The ACT Test Is Shrinking. Colleges Stopped Caring.

The ACT just announced it's getting shorter. Starting in 2025, students can skip the science section entirely, the test drops from four hours to under two, and every question becomes multiple choice with fewer of them. The nonprofit behind the exam calls it "more flexible" and "student-centered." Translation: the ACT is bleeding customers and this is a clearance sale. Here's the part nobody's saying loud enough. The ACT isn't changing because it suddenly discovered that teenagers hate sitting in a fluorescent-lit room for four hours. It's changing because it's losing. Badly. Before 2020, roughly 1.9 million students took the ACT every year. That number has cratered. The University of California system — the largest four-year public system in the country — went test-blind. Hundreds of other schools followed. When your product becomes optional, you don't get to keep pretending it's mandatory. So who actually benefits from a shorter ACT? Let's be honest about the math. The ACT is a business. It's technically a nonprofit, but its executives pull seven-figure salaries, and it charges roughly $60 to $90 per student before you even get to the add-ons — the writing test, the score reports, the retakes. Millions of students times dozens of dollars is a real revenue stream. Fewer test-takers means fewer dollars. A shorter, easier-to-schedule, less-intimidating test is a customer retention strategy dressed up as charity. And then there's the coaching industry, which is quietly thrilled. A shorter test doesn't mean less competition. It means every point matters more. When the exam shrinks, the margin between a 30 and a 33 gets thinner, and that's exactly the anxiety that fuels $200-an-hour tutors. The test gets shorter; the arms race gets longer. Now the uncomfortable question: does any of this help students? Maybe a little. Cutting the science section is defensible — it never really tested science, it tested whether you could read a graph under time pressure. A shorter test means less endurance fatigue, and endurance was always a hidden tax on kids who couldn't afford to take the test three times. But the deeper problem is untouched. The ACT still rewards speed over understanding, still correlates uncomfortably with family income, and still gives wealthy families a measurable edge because they can buy practice. Making it shorter doesn't fix the fairness gap. It just makes the gap cheaper to enter. Here's the cynical read, and I think it's the right one: colleges stopped requiring the ACT, so the ACT had to become something colleges might want again. That's not reform. That's product repositioning. The test didn't get better because someone cared about students. It got shorter because the market spoke. The honest takeaway for families? A shorter ACT is not a win and not a loss. It's a smaller version of the same game. If your kid is a strong test-taker, the new format probably helps them stand out faster. If they're not, nothing about this announcement changes their life. The test got shorter. The stakes didn't.