Landscape, a College Board tool for providing colleges with information about the educational environment of an applicant’s high school and neighborhood based on publicly available information, has been discontinued, the organization announced this week.
“As federal and state policy continues to evolve around how institutions use demographic and geographic information in admissions, we are making a change to ensure our work continues to effectively serve students and institutions,” College Board wrote in the short announcement.
Geographic recruitment has come under fire from the Trump administration. Attorney General Pamela Bondi, in a memo declaring various diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives unconstitutional, said that recruiting from specific areas or neighborhoods could be unlawful when it’s being done as a proxy for race. Experts have said that doing so is not a standard practice for universities.
Jon Boeckenstedt, a longtime enrollment manager, criticized the decision to discontinue Landscape in a post on LinkedIn.
“I’m no fan of College Board of course … but I thought Landscape was a good and thoughtful product,” he wrote. “Now, it’s going away. You don’t have to be Wile E. Coyote to figure out why. Someone in DC has suggested it’s too close to ‘race based admissions’ (a thing that does not exist) and ‘it’d be a shame if something happened to your company.’ Or their lawyers rolled over voluntarily.”
Edward Blum, the founder of Students for Fair Admissions, the group that successfully challenged affirmative action at the Supreme Court, lauded the decision.
“Since the 2023 Supreme Court opinion in our Harvard and UNC cases, Students for Fair Admissions raised has concerns that Landscape was little more than a disguised proxy for race in the admissions process. We are gratified that this problematic tool will no longer be used to influence who is and who is not admitted to America’s colleges and universities,” he wrote in a statement. “This decision represents another important step toward ensuring that all students are treated as individuals, not as representatives of a racial or ethnic group.”
