Of course not all schools are ending testing, MIT for example:
"We are reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles" https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our...
In MIT's case it probably is especially important to assess certain types of skills, because someone who doesn't have a reasonable math background for example is going to have a bad time. (Though problems doing math is a surprisingly common theme in higher ed including at the grad level--even with programs you wouldn't think were especially quantitative.)
It’s telling we’re seeing testing attacked while these are preserved.
Discretionary admissions with social goals turns the university, and its administrators, into institutions with broad public remit.
1) They're trying to get ahead of a Supreme Court ruling, which will likely rule Ivies are discriminating against Asian candidates.
2) Elite cultural zeitgeist is in favor of discriminating against Asian and non-elite white candidates.
3) More subtly, the top Ivy admins are overwhelmingly Jewish, and they've likely received push back from Jewish alumni/donors, as Asians have displaced smart-but-unremarkable Jewish candidates. A recent Tablet article alluded to Asians displacing Jewish candidates, which has been an unreported theme in the Ivies over the last 20 years.
Those three things are driving much of it.
And maybe employers, but employers tend to do their own tests because of the difficulty of comparing external test results across time and institutions.
And admission committees put a lot of time and effort into trying to discern qualities that go beyond some numbers of the page to admit a qualified but diverse student body (for reasons both good and arguably bad or ineffective).
However, certain groups sued saying that "equality of outcome" is more important than "equality of opportunity". They argued that if the outcome of a test showed intersectional differences, then the test must be biased. They succeeded in pressuring the various trade groups and industries to get rid of the tests or be sued into oblivion.
The trade groups that offered these tests realized it was just easier to require college degrees as a proxy instead of having their own specific tests and having to deal with these pressure groups. This is why many occupations these days require a degree when it seems like that should be unnecessary.
This slammed the door to upward mobility for many that the pressure groups were claiming to try to help.
Just because something claims to be fair doesn't mean it is.
A standardized test that tests your ability to do the job is still allowable — presumably even if minorities fare worse on it.
It was similar when I applied to grad school (this was engineering). They told us pretty unequivocally that getting a perfect GRE math score was pretty much required, but that the verbal went right in the bin, so don't worry about it.
It makes sense for engineering focused schools or those applying to engineering schools. I'm still less convinced places like Harvard where a good chunk of the students won't take a ultra-difficult math class during their time there has much use in the SATs. At least in the "I got a 1580 on my SATs but someone with a 1570 got in over me, how is that fair?" Kind of way.