When the Supreme Court banned affirmative
action in college admissions in 2023, many universities began looking more
closely at socioeconomic status to admit more diverse classes without considering
race.
Scores of schools turned to a tool created
by the College Board, which administers by SAT exam, to identify promising high
school students from disadvantage neighborhoods and schools.
Last week, the College Board quietly notified
schools that it was eliminating the tool, called Landscape. The board provided
little explanation for its decision.
The move comes at a time when the Trump
administration has stepped up its attacks on diversity
efforts in education, and less than a month after the White House said it would
be on the lookout for schools using “hidden racial proxies” to
seek out minority applicants.
It is unclear whether Landscape was being
used for that purpose. The tool was an online dashboard where college
admission officers could enter an applicant’s address and high school, and see
a wealth of data on the community where the student lived, including median
family income, the percentage of single-parent households and the crime rate.
Racial demographics
were not included.
Landscape had been under review by an
anti-affirmative-action group, Students for Fair Admissions, whose lawsuits
against Harvard and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill resulted in the
Supreme Court ruling.
The decision by the College Board to withdraw the tool seemed very likely to be
related to the defensive posture that many schools are adopting in response to
the conservative assault against the use of
race in college admissions.
The College Board has removed much of the information
about Landscape from its website, and posted a note saying that the tool was “intentionally
developed without the use or consideration of data on race or ethnicity.’
Edward Blum, founder of Students for Fair
Admissions, said that Landscape had become the focus of mounting legal, public
and media scrutiny.
‘’Any tool that allows admissions offices to consider race by proxy is a
legal and reputation risk,” Blum said in an email.
Among those who have pushed for a
class-based approach to increasing college diversity, however, the withdrawal
of Landscape seemed misguided.
“It is race-neutral and its use is perfectly legal,” said Richard D. Kahlenberg, director of the America Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute. (Stephanie Saul and Dana Goldstein)
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