In selective college admissions, “context” is quickly becoming a dirty word.
The administration’s proposed “compact” with higher education would mandate the use of standardized testing in admission; the document further stipulates that “admissions decisions shall be based upon and evaluated against objective criteria published on the University’s website and available to all prospective applicants and members of the public.”
Indeed, the announcement by the College Board last month that it was discontinuing Landscape, a tool that provided admissions officers with data about a student’s high school and neighborhood—including median family income, local college-going rates and school resources—was so alarming because it marks a pivot in selective college admissions away from understanding students’ achievements in the context of their backgrounds and toward judging everyone by standardized metrics like GPA and test scores.
With such an approach, standardized measures are assumed to be neutral and free from the messy entanglements of social inequality. By contrast, contextual information—like whether a student had access to advanced coursework, stable housing or enrichment programs—is increasingly seen as subjective, political and even discriminatory.
But the truth is just the opposite.
Reducing the consideration of context in holistic admissions doesn’t make the process more fair—it just makes it blind to the realities of inequality. It allows wealth to masquerade as merit, reinforcing systemic inequalities by rewarding those who already have the greatest access to opportunity.
As higher education scholars and practitioners, we have seen firsthand how contextual data makes the admission process more fair by revealing what grades and test scores alone can’t: who a student is, what they’ve overcome and how much more they can achieve. Embracing contextual data, not reducing it, is the answer to ensuring access to higher education, a proven pathway to upward mobility.
The Shifting Landscape of College Admissions
The end of Landscape coincides with unprecedented change in selective college admissions, including the Supreme Court’s ban on the consideration of race in admissions, the rapid spread of test-optional policies and increases in application volume, just to name a few. As a result of these shifts, admission officers are increasingly making high-stakes decisions with less time, fewer data points and greater scrutiny than ever before.
That is why high-quality contextual data about applicants is so essential. Yet the problem is that such data is often inaccessible or of questionable quality.
Our research has highlighted persistent gaps in the contextual information admissions officers can access. For example, school profiles—documents submitted to colleges by high school counselors to explain a school’s academic offerings, grading system and student body—are often incomplete, outdated or missing entirely. We found that many school profiles lack even the most basic elements admissions officers need to interpret an applicant’s academic record fairly.
Other qualitative elements of the application that can provide context also show patterns of bias. Research has found that letters of recommendation often reflect deep income disparities: Students attending higher-resourced schools are significantly more likely to receive longer, more personalized letters, often written by individuals familiar with the college admission process. Meanwhile, school counselors report limited training in how to craft thoughtful letters of recommendation.
Why Context?
One of the greatest risks in today’s selective college admissions debates is the weaponization and misuse of “context” by those with the most resources. Students from wealthy families enter the process with every structural advantage—well-funded schools, extensive extracurriculars, private tutors, test preparation and often legacy or donor connections. To recognize and respect the context of applicants from low-income, rural or working-class backgrounds is not to diminish the accomplishments of the wealthy; it is to ensure that success is measured by individual effort and achievement, not just by access to opportunity.
Admissions should be a process to determine who has the potential to succeed, and as such determining potential requires admission offices to evaluate students in their local contexts. Doing so respects students’ unique starting points and acknowledges that hard work looks different when resources are scarce. A student who endures long commutes, multiple jobs or limited access to technology has achievements that are no less valuable than polished résumés shaped by circumstances of unlimited support.
Expecting admission officers to assess students based on absolute standards, divorced from the resources and environments that shaped them, is like judging the height of a plant without considering the size of the pot it grew in. Far from harming those with resources, contextual review accounts for varying scopes of opportunity, allowing higher education to serve as a ladder of earned individual mobility rather than an amplifier of existing inequality.
Admission officers need access to high-quality contextual data about applicants, because even the most traveled admissions team cannot begin to scratch the surface of the nearly 30,000 high schools in the U.S. As selective colleges hire fleets of seasonal application readers to help sort through the large volume of applications, it becomes even more difficult to effectively communicate the context that students learn in. This goes beyond any particular student or school characteristics. Rather, it speaks to the very essence of what and how students learn. Should a student be penalized for not taking calculus when their high school curriculum only goes as far as Algebra II? Can we expect students to meaningfully participate in extracurricular activities when the average student commutes 90 minutes each way?
The goal is not just to provide context on students’ high schools and neighborhood environments. Rather, it’s to synthesize such context so that admission officers have the same information on all applicants. The fate of a student’s college admissions decision should not lie in whether their particular evaluator is familiar with that student’s high school or hometown. Nor should we expect that any given evaluator has the time to independently research the rurality or curricular offerings facing any particular applicant.
The Landscape tool helped reduce the odds that such insights were left to chance. Research led by Michael Bastedo at the University of Michigan demonstrated that contextual information about applicants’ high schools and hometowns helped create more equitable admission outcomes for students of lower socioeconomic status, laying the groundwork for what eventually became the Landscape tool. While Landscape wasn’t perfect, it made it possible for even the most novice admission professional to pick up an application and consider whether a student took advantage of the opportunities available to them. Now that Landscape is gone, it is essential for college admissions offices to find new—and better—ways to ensure students’ unique contextual experiences remain part of the holistic review process.
Recommendations
Higher education should not retreat from the hard, necessary work of understanding students as more than just numbers. We offer here some suggestions on how to move forward:
- Compile standardized, high-quality contextual data. Colleges need accurate information about school resources, community demographics and economic conditions. While some of the contextual data admission officers need to make fair, informed decisions is found in existing application elements like school profiles and recommendation letters, that information is not standardized and is of varied quality. Admission officers need access to standardized, high-quality contextual data. The elimination of Landscape offers an opportunity for other organizations, including colleges themselves, to develop new tools for systematically collecting or aggregating contextual data.
- Clarify expectations. Colleges and universities should communicate with school counselors and college advisers regarding the types of contextual information they value in the review process and how to provide it. For example, explicitly sharing expectations about high school profiles is one easy area to target. Encouraging high schools to include information about schools’ college-going culture (e.g., counselor caseload, dedicated time for college counseling) in their profiles could improve profile quality and utility.
- Educate admission officers. Officers should receive extensive training in contextual awareness, understanding the wide variation in school and community opportunities. They must have the time, expertise and resources to apply this knowledge thoughtfully, ensuring that context informs but does not dominate the evaluation of each student.
- Seek creative solutions. In the absence of a universal approach to curating contextual information, or perhaps as an interim strategy, colleges and universities should include supplemental questions about context as part of their applications. Universities might draw inspiration from applications for competitive programs like QuestBridge, which capture and integrate contextual information through tailored questions about students’ backgrounds and experiences at home and school.
Admissions has long involved a blend of quantitative and qualitative judgment. But as metrics narrow and systems grow more strained, there is a real risk that the process defaults to what is easiest to measure, not what is most meaningful. And in doing so, it will leave behind exactly the students who most need—and deserve—a closer look.
Tara P. Nicola is a higher education researcher. Mandy Savitz-Romer is the Nancy Pforzheimer Aronson Senior Lecturer in Human Development and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Julius DiLorenzo is a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan Marsal Family School of Education.
