Colleges Drop Swim Tests

When I was in college, I had to pass a swim test. Everyone had to.

Not anymore. It is racist.

The age-old requirement that college seniors must pass a swimming test is being dumped due to fears it discriminates against people of color.

Dartmouth College just became the latest school to drop a mandatory swimming test from its graduation prerequisite.

In doing so, the Ivy League school joins a handful of other elite institutions that have abandoned their swimming requirements in recent years, including Williams, Hamilton and Washington and Lee.

“The shift says less about the merits of staying afloat than about universities’ preoccupation with racial equity,” reports The Economist.

666666666 Schools with a swimming test as part of their diploma obligations have been doing so since the early 1900s, the news outlet says.

If you failed the swim test, you had to take a swim class. It was too embarrassing when those classes filled up with Black students.

A lot of these colleges have also had to have remedial classes in reading, writing, and arithmetic. These too have become embarrassing, and colleges are re-packaging them as support labs or co-requisites or some other euphemism.