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This year, Denver Public Schools seniors with a 3.0 grade point average or higher will receive automatic admission from Colorado State University in lieu of a traditional application. I don’t think that’s the win it’s being sold as, and I think we’ve already run this experiment once at a national scale and watched it fail.

In 2001, the United States Congress passed No Child Left Behind, requiring 100% of American public schools to show their progress be proficient in reading and math by 2014. It was an impossible bar, and states knew it early on. So when states inevitably didn’t get every kid there, they instead moved the finish line.

A federal study found 16 states lowered their eighth grade math proficiency standards between 2005 and 2007, and 31 states set fourth grade reading standards below what the National Assessment of Educational Progress considers merely basic performance. Joanne Weiss, who inherited the law as chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of Education, put it plainly: The 100% mandate incentivized states to dumb down their minimum scores to help more students succeed, calling it “a huge disservice” to the entire educational system.

The other move was to narrow what was taught. Independent researchers spent six years documenting that “teaching to the test” under NCLB squeezed arts, foreign language, social studies, physical education and recess out of classrooms, especially in schools serving low-income and minority students; and a RAND-affiliated study of California, Georgia and Pennsylvania districts confirmed teachers narrowed instruction only to what would be covered on the test.

None of it made a single student smarter. It made the paperwork look better.

I bring up a 20-year-old law because CSU finalized an agreement Aug. 10 that guarantees Fort Collins admission to any DPS senior with a 3.0 grade point average or higher — it’s the same move, just dressed up nicer. CSU Pueblo already admits DPS seniors at a 2.3 GPA or higher with no application. CSU Global guarantees admission and a tuition cut at the same 2.3. The University of Colorado Denver added a similar procedure at 3.0 in September 2025. These aren’t new thresholds; CSU Fort Collins already admits about 88.5% of applicants.

The bar isn’t being met. It’s being renamed.

Here’s my actual worry, and it’s not that DPS students don’t deserve college; it’s that a GPA is exactly the kind of number NCLB taught us not to trust. American College Testing’s analysis of over 4 million transcripts found average high school GPAs rose from 3.22 to 3.39 between 2010 and 2021, while ACT scores over the same students fell. In one Los Angeles data point, 83% of sixth graders received As, Bs or Cs in a year while only 27% met state proficiency standards.

Lower the bar, and you don’t get more prepared students. You get the same students, standing exactly where they were, now holding a piece of paper that tells them otherwise. And they find out about the gap the hard way: mid-semester, alone, in Fort Collins. When you build a guarantee on a number that’s already drifting away from what it’s supposed to measure, you’re not opening a door. You’re printing a ticket to a train that might not go where it says.

I understand why this happens. Nobody at DPS or CSU is a villain in this regard. Higher education is heading into a real enrollment cliff, with high school graduates projected to fall 13% nationally by 2041. CSU needs a pipeline. DPS is Colorado’s largest district, with a budget around $1.5 billion, and wants a real answer to, “What happens after graduation?” Those are legitimate pressures. They’re also exactly the pressures that made states game NCLB. Understanding why an institution cuts a corner doesn’t make the corner-cutting fine, and “We had good reasons” was true in 2007, too.

It also isn’t distributed evenly. Aurora Public Schools serve over 38,000 students, well under half of DPS’s roughly 90,000, with a higher share, 74.6%, on free or reduced lunch than DPS’s 65.2%. Aurora signed their own guarantee with CU Denver after DPS did, but they still have no guarantee for CSU’s flagship campus — only DPS does. So who actually gets to decide that? Nobody voted on which district’s seniors deserve a free pass and which don’t; a handful of superintendents and university administrators drew that line in a signing ceremony, and it happened to fall in Denver’s favor.

Is it fair that where you happen to go to high school determines whether college costs you an application or costs you nothing? I don’t think it is, and I don’t think “We signed the deal with them first” is a real answer to that question.

To be fair, research shows direct admission increases the likelihood of college applications, especially among first-generation and low-income students, by roughly 12%. Removing the requirement for applications removes a genuine barrier. But it doesn’t reliably move where students enroll, meaning it solves the paperwork problem while leaving the readiness problem exactly where it was.

So who is this actually helping? Not the DPS senior who shows up in Fort Collins underprepared and discovers that in solitude. Not the Aurora senior who doesn’t get the same offer. It helps CSU’s application numbers heading into a shrinking applicant pool, and it helps DPS put out a press release about access. Those are real institutional wins, but they are not the same thing as a win for the student holding the letter.

Removing a barrier is good. Redefining ready so more people clear the bar without changing what they know is not the same thing. We already have 20 years of federal data showing what it costs when we confuse the two. We didn’t leave fewer kids behind. We just stopped measuring where they stood.

Reach Maci Lesh at letters@collegian.com or on social media @macileshmedia.