The Supreme Court has said universities cannot racially discriminate in admissions. The Trump administration has made it clear that they will pursue every coercive avenue until universities commit to restoring merit to admissions.

Hear hear.

But what does "merit" mean?

This is not an abstract question. Universities retain countless backdoors to manipulate their definition of "merit" to achieve predetermined outcomes. More profoundly, when was the last time America asked, as a society, what it wants to select for in its future leaders, managers, businessmen, lawyers, doctors, and intellectuals?

The time has come for a National School-Leaving Exam that establishes an objective, transparent standard for college admissions across America.

The Current System Is Rotten Beyond Racial Preferences

The problems with our current admissions system run deeper than explicit racial preferences. Even with those preferences banned, universities manipulate supposedly objective criteria to engineer their desired outcomes.

Consider the SAT, long viewed as the gold standard of standardized testing. The College Board published a "playbook" in 2019 on how admissions officers can use apparently race-neutral strategies to boost the number of black and Hispanic students at their respective colleges and universities, such as minimizing the role of standardized tests in the application process. The organization that creates the SAT actively coaches universities on how to circumvent merit-based admissions. The test itself has been repeatedly modified not to better assess academic potential, but to narrow racial scoring gaps.

Grade point averages are also a problematic metric. A 4.0 from a top science school means something entirely different from a 4.0 from an average public school. In theory, admissions officials can simply manage this reality; in practice, it's an opportunity to game the system.

Of course, extracurricular activities and personal essays are the worst of all. Everybody knows that the extracurricular activities that kids engage in for the purpose of college admissions are mostly fake, and that the inclusion of extracurricular activities benefit the not-terribly-bright children of the upper middle class whose parents have the time and the social capital to coach little Theodore on starting an NGO that uses AI to teach unhoused queer migrants to code. Meanwhile, personal essays have become little more than tests of ideological compliance. Beyond the rightly infamous case of the (very privileged) student who got into Stanford by just writing "#BlackLivesMatter" a hundred times in his essay, every admissions consultant will tell parents that they need the kid to show his fealty to the woke ideology of the ruling class. This author knows of one admissions consultant who typically counsels applicants, with great success, to tell (and invent if need be) a story about confronting a racist relative.

Racial preferences are but one component of an entire suite of strategies that elite university admissions officers use to admit "the right kind of people," that is to say, the children of the coastal woke elite, and keep out the "wrong kind of people," that is to say, kids from the middle of the country, especially if they happen to be white or heterosexual or male.

The Only Workable Solution: A National School-Leaving Exam

It used to be that each university could be left to its own devices and to work out its own admissions policy, and in the end, everything would work itself out. Except that that's not the reality. All of the Top 100 schools in America, with very few exceptions such as MIT and Caltech, have, in practice, the same admissions policy: they look for the same things and select on the same bases. Because of the woke hive mind, we already have a de facto national school admissions process, it just happens to be run by a decentralized hive mind rather than some Ministry of Education.

A university admissions system must do two things. It must select for merit, ability, talent, whatever you want to call it, fairly and efficiently. But that's not all. Equally importantly, it must be seen and believed by the rest of the society to be doing those things. The only way that university admissions can meet those goals in the post-DEI era is through a system that is completely transparent, robust, and legible. The only way this writer knows how, the way that has been practiced by so many great countries down the centuries, from France to Japan, is a National School-Leaving Exam.

This exam would be administered in person, with handwritten responses, submitted and graded entirely anonymously with no identifying information whatsoever. No names, no zip codes, no school identifiers—just a number and pure academic performance.

Grading would employ multiple blind reviewers for essays, with AI soon taking over. AI doesn't care about a student's background, race, or connections, and the purpose of grading the essay is not to come up with some sort of profound appreciation of it, but merely to rank a student relative to its peers.

The matching process would be very simple. Students rank their preferred schools, and an algorithm starts with the highest-scoring student nationally, giving them their first choice. It proceeds through every student in rank order. If a student's first choice is full, they get their second choice, and so on. Complete transparency, zero manipulation, pure merit.

An Exam That Favors Merit—And American Greatness

The core of this exam should be a scientifically validated IQ test. Unlike the SAT, which as we have seen is not reliable, IQ tests measure raw cognitive ability.

Building on this foundation, the exam should include rigorous tests of logic and reasoning. The Classic Learning Test, an alternative to the establishment tests, covers, among others, verbal reasoning, grammar/writing and quantitative reasoning and might ask about an Albert Einstein speech in 1921 or from Pope John Paul II's statement in 1984 or Machiavelli's The Prince. The CLT demonstrates how we can assess students' ability to engage with complex ideas and timeless texts rather than the ideologically curated contemporary passages that dominate current standardized tests.

The exam should incorporate elements similar to the LSAT's logical reasoning sections, which test the kind of analytical thinking required for success in demanding academic programs. These cannot be memorized or drilled—they require genuine intellectual horsepower. The LSAT has consistently been a reliable predictor of future performance.

Most importantly, the National School-Leaving Exam must include substantial essay components on American History and American Values. These essays would be based on a national curriculum established by a commission appointed by President Trump, building on the foundation of the 1776 Project. The 1776 Commission was established to support what Trump called "patriotic education" and to write a report on "core principles of the American founding and how these principles may be understood to further enjoyment of 'the blessings of liberty'"—an excellent basis on which to start.

Students would write essays demonstrating their understanding of the Founding Fathers' vision and its underpinnings in the Anglo-Protestant civilization, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the role of free enterprise in American prosperity, and all the other principles that make America exceptional. This isn't indoctrination—it's ensuring that those who benefit from American higher education understand and appreciate the civilization that created these institutions.

Dealing With Special Cases

Recognizing that not all students are destined for liberal arts education, the exam should offer a Science Track. This version would include the IQ test, a basic writing assessment, the American Values essay, and then extensive testing in mathematics, physics, and spatial reasoning (including shape rotation tests that predict engineering aptitude). This allows future engineers and scientists to demonstrate their specific talents without being penalized for lacking interest in humanities.

College athletics are too integral to American culture to ignore. Athletes should be permitted to submit a separate dossier including competition results and recommendations from coaches. This athletic component would be scored from 0 to 100, and each university could decide annually what percentage of the total score (up to 50%) should come from athletic achievement. SEC schools should still be able to recruit the best athletes for their college football programs for the sake of fans and alumni, but only if the athletes meet at least a bare standard of ability; meanwhile purely academically focused schools will be happy to ignore athletic accomplishments; and hopefully many will land somewhere in-between.

The exam system could include a points system, worth up to 10% of the total score, for objective extracurricular accomplishments. National debate championships, science competition victories, mathematical olympiad medals—in other words, achievements that can be objectively verified and ranked. An independent commission would establish point values for recognized accomplishments, removing the incentive to create fake NGOs and fake startups.

Unleashing American Talent

This system wouldn't just ensure fairness. It would unleash talent currently suppressed by our broken system. And we are not only referring to demographics that are currently being discriminated against. The current college admissions process has become a soul-crushing grind that rewards not intelligence or creativity, but the ability to check boxes and play the game. It favors the conscientious rule-follower who spends four years padding their resume over the brilliant iconoclast who spent those years reading deeply.

A single, high-stakes exam rewards actual intelligence. The creative genius who found high school boring but possesses extraordinary intellectual gifts would finally have their chance to shine. These are exactly the kinds of minds we need in our top universities—not the grade-grubbing conformists who excel at gaming the current system, but the bold thinkers who will drive American innovation forward.

President Trump has already taken the first crucial steps by reviving the 1776 Commission and challenging the racial preferences that corrupted our universities. Now it's time to complete the revolution. A National School-Leaving Exam would restore meritocracy, celebrate American values, and ensure that our best and brightest, regardless of background, have the opportunity to reach their full potential.