Stanford University has announced that it will bring back standardized testing requirements for undergraduate admissions, joining other elite colleges and universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth in reverting back to their pre-COVID practices. After numerous universities appeased the demands of terrorist sympathizers and plagiarism scandals rocked academia, the decision to raise standards of admission was an inevitable first step in trying to rebuild public trust.

The timing of Stanford’s announcement was almost poetic, coming just days after 13 pro-Palestinian protesters were charged with felony burglary after occupying the university president’s office. Similarly raucous protests have become common at the university, and a poll from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression showed that more than one-third of Stanford students think it is acceptable to use violence to stop a campus speech. The illiberal climate at the school is icing out the already small number of conservative students, but the insanity is not confined to just Stanford.

The encampments earlier this year proved that something decisively sinister is happening on college campuses, where leftist academics are coddling extremism and hatred through an ever-expanding DEI bureaucracy and an intellectual bubble that does not reflect the real world. The removal of standardized tests for admissions almost certainly reinforced the divide between elite colleges and normal people, as admissions officers were able to place a greater emphasis on subjective criteria such as community participation than the objective application strength provided by a good test score.

While reimplementing standardized tests is a critical first step in fixing college admissions, a lot more needs to be done. Ivy League schools and most of their highly ranked peers, such as Stanford and Northwestern University, now have acceptance rates that are under 10%, while Harvard and the California Institute of Technology have rates that are closer to 3%. “Elite” college admissions cannot be all merit-based at that point, and perfectly qualified students are rejected simply because there is not enough space. Moreover, as most of these schools have “holistic” admissions policies, a student with perfect test scores and a perfect GPA could be passed over in favor of a less-qualified student with a compelling story.

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College admissions would greatly benefit from taking an approach that is as objective as possible: Test scores, GPAs, and class rigor should have a lot more influence than whether an applicant is an activist. A deeper problem than that, however, is the extreme focus on a small number of highly ranked institutions that are rotten to the core rather than guiding students to large public universities or smaller private schools, where the insanity is present but not as prevalent.

College admissions are broken because academia is broken. Universities no longer want to admit the most qualified students because they are so caught up in breaking down what it means to be “qualified.” The proposal to have an entirely merit-based application process is not original, but neither is it likely to be implemented anytime soon.