On June 30, ETS agreed to acquire ACT. If you lead a district or sit on the procurement side of a state education agency, this is a vendor-concentration event before it is anything else. One supplier now spans the testing contracts you depend on: state summative assessment, the college-admissions exam that many states use to satisfy federal accountability, teacher licensing through Praxis, and the WorkKeys workforce credential embedded in your graduation pathways.
The acquirer matters to how you read it. ETS is buying ACT while cutting hard. Five rounds of layoffs in five years, buyouts offered to most of its US workforce, program-service revenue at a 15-year low, the SAT contract lost in 2024, and the GRE and TOEFL up for sale as of January. You are not looking at a confident expansion. You are looking at a distressed organization consolidating around the contracts it has decided to keep, and the ones it has decided to keep are increasingly yours.
I. What you lost is leverage
The thing this deal removed from your side of the table is a competitor you were using whether you named it or not. For a decade, the reason states could move contracts, Illinois from ACT to SAT and back, Colorado to SAT, Kentucky to SAT this spring, was that
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