Today we just learned that more US colleges have dropped or plan to erase a certain part of the assessment tests as part of the admissions requirements such as ACT/SAT subject test or essay scores.  Needless to say that statistical analyses have shown that some of these dropped assessment components have significant effects on both student’s retention and graduation.  Perhaps IRI analytics has been applied on institutional past evidence that has shown otherwise and in-depth studies have been done at those colleges to support such admissions policy changes.  Dropping them will surely help to increase the institutions’ enrollment which in turns will increase revenue generated from tuition.  While this policy sounds great, it may potentially create another problem on both retention and graduation rate.  These two important metrics are usually used in the state performance based funding.  Lowering the admissions standards, will increase tuition revenue only in the short-run.  However, in the long-run it potentially will reduce money received from the state, especially in the state where performance based funding has been applied to make award decisions.  The institutions will be able to keep both its retention and graduation rate unchanged or even better after the policy got implemented by lowering their courses passing requirements.  In other words, reducing the admissions standards will force the instructors to lower their courses standard as well.  Making the college admissions less rigorous only shows a clear signal of decreasing student enrollment across the US.  It maybe a beginning of self-destruction toward the US higher ed system.