Let’s take those points one by one:

Only 10 percent of first-year Chicago undergraduates in 2016-17 received Pell grants — the largest federal aid program, which typically go to students in the bottom half of the country’s income distribution. No other top-ranked college has such a small share of Pell students.

That same year (the most recent for which there are comparable statistics) 13 percent of first-year students at both Duke and Johns Hopkins received Pell grants, according to the Education Department. The share was 14 percent at Stanford; 15 percent at Harvard; 16 percent at Yale; 17 percent at Columbia and M.I.T.; and 18 percent at Northwestern, which is just a short drive up the Lake Michigan shore from Chicago. Princeton led elite private colleges, with 21 percent.

Chicago officials claim that the Pell numbers don’t fully capture the economic diversity of its student body. But after writing about this subject for more than a decade, I can tell you that’s what every college with an unimpressive Pell share claims. The truth is, Chicago isn’t doing a very good job of attracting the many extremely talented and hard-working disadvantaged teenagers who live in the United States.

As for the ACT and SAT: Abandoning them does not guarantee that a college will become more economically diverse. (That Inside Higher Ed article has a good overview of the research.) Why not? An admissions policy that puts more weight on personal statements and extracurricular activities may actually help affluent students.

The University of Chicago is a fantastic college, which is why this situation is dispiriting. Chicago could be a much more powerful engine of economic opportunity if it adopted a fairer admissions policy. Its splashy announcement last week doesn’t guarantee such a policy.