Ellie Park, Senior Photographer

With unique COVID-19 pandemic admissions policies and the overturning of affirmative action, the last four years of Yale College applicants have traversed unprecedented test-optional policies and the end of race-conscious admissions. 

As the senior class departs from Yale, younger students are still navigating the effects of a changing undergraduate admissions process. Still, they are aware that admissions officers must juggle changing external conditions with the prevailing challenge of too few seats to accommodate deserving students.

Beginning in 2020, the Office of Undergraduate Admissions exempted applicants from the requirement of submitting standardized test scores due to the possibility that students may be unable to test because of the pandemic. Yale, along with its peer institutions, adopted a test-optional admissions policy that June, which initially only affected the 2020-21 admissions cycle, during which most of the class of 2025 applied.

Test-optional admissions continued through the 2021-22, 2022-23 and 2023-24 admissions cycles, which allowed the admissions office to “generate new data and analyses” about the usefulness of test scores in evaluating Yale applicants, according to its website. The office concluded that collecting test scores allows for the identification of “students whose performance stands out in their high school context” in a way that could otherwise go undetected.

With this analysis in mind, the admissions office shifted to a “test-flexible” policy, which was announced in February 2024 for students applying during the 2024-25 admissions cycles. For the foreseeable future, applicants must submit some form of standardized test scores, whether those be AP, IB, SAT or ACT scores. 

The Admissions Office emphasizes that applicants’ test scores will always be considered in conversation with the rest of the information contained within a student’s admissions file. In an interview with Yale News last February, Quinlan said that scores will never be “fed into a weighting rubric or algorithm” and will always be evaluated by a set of human eyes. 

The office has doubled down on its holistic approach to admissions in the wake of the June 2023 Supreme Court decision that ruled race-conscious affirmative action policies at elite institutions like Yale to be unconstitutional. This decision has received mixed reactions from the general public and at universities across the country. 

The roots of affirmative action policies lie in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, when President Lyndon Johnson prioritized equal opportunities for all in employment and education. Over the past half-century, race-based admissions policies have faced a slew of legal actions that culminated in the June 2023 decision.

Black and Latine enrollment at Yale College remained steady in the first post-affirmative action class of admitted students. For the class of 2029, which is the first to be admitted after both affirmative action and test-optional policies have been removed, changes in enrollment numbers have not yet been released.

The Office of Undergraduate Admissions is located at 38 Hillhouse Ave.