Two years after Educational Testing Services lost its contract to administer the SAT, ETS acquired the ACT from a private business firm.
“Every student deserves a solid education, a fair shot at college, and a path to a good career,” said Amit Sevak, CEO of ETS on Tuesday in a press release announcing the adoption of the ACT, a standardized college admissions test that rivals the SAT. “In partnership with ACT, we are committed to serving students and parents as well as teachers and districts by expanding access to education and career opportunities across America.”
(ETS declined to disclose the terms of the agreement to Within Higher Ed.)
The deal is the latest move by ETS and ACT to increase their presence in the competency-based accreditation market amid the rise of selective college admissions policies that began during the crisis. Although colleges and universities have used both the SAT and the ACT to help assess an applicant’s suitability for success for decades, during the 2026 admissions cycle less than 10 percent of bachelor’s degree-granting institutions required applicants to submit ACT or SAT scores.
Both tests saw declining participation rates in the 2020s.
In 2025, only 1.38 million students took the ACT, compared to 1.78 million in 2019. That drop in demand led ACT to lay off more than 100 employees in 2023 and sell the nonprofit to private equity firm Nexus Capital Management the following year. At the time, Janet Godwin, then CEO of ACT, said the acquisition was intended to double down on assessing “college and career readiness” and reaching a wider range of students, job seekers and employers.
In addition to administering college admissions tests—36 percent of high school graduates by 2025—ACT also provides career planning tools and operates ACT WorkKeys, a workforce assessment program that awards the National Work Readiness Certificate, which is used by thousands of American employers to assess skills in the workplace.
“Being part of ETS will allow us to take what we’ve built and measure it with a broader view of readiness,” said Steve Tapp, CEO of ACT, in a statement released Tuesday. “Joining ETS gives us a platform to achieve our mission to a degree that we cannot achieve alone. This is about more students getting the guidance they deserve, and more of them finding their way forward with confidence.”
The same year ACT became a for-profit company, ETS — which had undergone several rounds of layoffs since 2019 — lost its contract to administer the College Board’s SAT. And although ETS still owns and administers two of the largest tests in the country—the Graduate Record Examination and the Test of English as a Foreign Language—participation in those has also declined. In January, reports surfaced that ETS was looking to sell or acquire strategic investors in the two trials, although no deals have been publicly announced.
In the meantime, ETS has been doing everything possible to improve the job readiness test.
Last fall it launched FutureNav Compass, which allows students to complete an assessment of their skills—including hard-to-measure soft skills, such as communication, resilience and teamwork—and present a “competency-based transcript” to employers. This spring, ETS also announced that it will participate in the development of the upcoming Khan TED Institute experiment, which aims to soon offer degrees in artificial intelligence that are cheaper and faster than similar degrees offered at traditional colleges and universities.
ETS’ ACT acquisition this week is yet another indication that there is a growing need for more detailed, candidate-specific testing, said Michael Nettles, a professor of psychiatry at Morgan State University and former chair of policy evaluation and research at ETS.
“SAT and ACT scores can be useful because they can tell us something in general about the candidates,” he said Within Higher Ednoting that some colleges have recently rescinded their optional testing policies. “But colleges, universities and employers want to know more about candidates—their commitment to learning and how they learn—that will help them make decisions about matching people and places.”
