In the fall of 2025, Yale formed a presidential council for undergraduate admissions to review relevant policies and procedures and make recommendations to assure continued compliance with all laws, integrity of applications, and academic excellence in the years ahead. The council’s work—an extension of the efforts that Yale College began following the Supreme Court’s ruling in 2023 to review undergraduate admissions policies and procedures—also considered recent executive orders and guidelines from federal agencies.
The council completed its work at the end of the 2025-2026 academic year, concluding that Yale’s undergraduate admissions process is rigorous and recommending ways to further strengthen the admissions process. In addition to a thorough review of existing policies, these recommendations were informed by extensive input from faculty, students, staff, and alumni.
The council reaffirmed academic strength as the primary consideration when evaluating applicants and Yale’s holistic approach to admissions. After reviewing recent research on the role of standardized tests in admissions, the council recommended requiring first-year and transfer applicants to submit ACT or SAT scores. These test scores are strong predictors of a student’s future Yale academic performance, and there is evidence that they are less subject to bias than other elements of an application. A standardized test provides only one window into a student’s academic potential, and no one factor perfectly predicts success at Yale; test scores are considered in the context of whole-person review of all applications. The council also made recommendations to prevent misrepresentation on applications and increase transparency across the admissions process—a focus shared by the Committee on Trust in Higher Education, which delivered its report on April 10, 2026. It recommended further study of how to enhance access, transparency, and fairness in the admissions process.
The university has updated its admissions process and website to reflect these recommendations, and the council’s chair, Dean Pericles Lewis, will continue to draw on this work and consider the recommendations of the committee and council as he leads Yale College.
Alongside Dean Lewis, the council’s members included Jeff Brock, dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science; Kerwin Charles, Indra K. Nooyi Dean of the School of Management; Marvin Chun, Richard M. Colgate Professor of Psychology and former dean of Yale College; Charles Goodyear ’80; George Pataki ’67; Megan Ranney, dean of the Yale School of Public Health; and Kate Walsh ’77 BA, ’79 MPH. Susan Gibbons, chief of staff to the president and vice provost for collections & scholarly communication, staffed the committee.
