\n<\/p>\n
Earlier this month, College Board announced its decision to kill Landscape, a race-neutral tool that allowed admissions readers to better understand a student\u2019s context for opportunity. After an awkward 2019 rollout as the \u201cAdversity Score,\u201d Landscape gradually gained traction in many selective admissions offices. Among other items, the dashboard provided information on the applicant\u2019s high school, including the economic makeup of their high school class, participation trends for Advanced Placement courses and the school\u2019s percentile SAT scores, as well as information about the local community.<\/p>\n
Landscape was one of the more extensively studied interventions in the world of college admissions, reflecting how providing more information about an applicant\u2019s circumstances can boost the likelihood of a low-income student being admitted. Admissions officers lack high-quality, detailed information on the high school environment for an estimated 25\u00a0percent of applicants, a trend that disproportionately disadvantages low-income students. Landscape helped fill that critical gap.<\/p>\n
While not every admissions office used it, Landscape was fairly popular within pockets of the admissions community, as it provided a more standardized, consistent way for admissions readers to understand an applicant\u2019s environment. So why did College Board decide to ax it? In its statement on the decision, College Board noted that \u201cfederal and state policy continues to evolve around how institutions use demographic and geographic information in admissions.\u201d The statement seems to be referring to the Trump administration\u2019s nonbinding guidance that institutions should not use geographic targeting as a proxy for race in admissions. <\/p>\n
If College Board was worried that somehow people were using the tool as a proxy for race (and they weren\u2019t), well, it wasn\u2019t a very good one. In the most comprehensive study of Landscape being used on the ground, researchers found that it didn\u2019t do anything to increase racial\/ethnic diversity in admissions. Things are different when it comes to economic diversity. Use of Landscape is<\/em> linked with a boost in the likelihood of admission for low-income students. As such, it was a helpful tool given the continued underrepresentation of low-income students at selective institutions.<\/p>\n Still, no study to date found that Landscape had any effect on racial\/ethnic diversity. The findings are unsurprising. After all, Landscape was, to quote College Board, \u201cintentionally developed without the use or consideration of data on race or ethnicity.\u201d If you look at the laundry list of items included in Landscape, absent are items like the racial\/ethnic demographics of the high school, neighborhood or community.<\/p>\n While race and class are correlated, they certainly aren\u2019t interchangeable. Admissions officers weren\u2019t using Landscape as a proxy for race; they were using it to compare a student\u2019s SAT score or AP course load to those of their high school classmates. Ivy League institutions that have gone back to requiring SAT\/ACT scores have stressed the importance of evaluating test scores in the student\u2019s high school context. Eliminating Landscape makes it harder to do so.<\/p>\n An important consideration: Even if using Landscape were<\/em> linked with increased racial\/ethnic diversity, its usage would not violate the law. The Supreme Court recently declined to hear the case Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board. In declining to hear the case, the court has likely issued a tacit blessing on race-neutral methods to advance diversity in admissions. The decision leaves the Fourth Circuit opinion, which affirmed the race-neutral admissions policy used to boost diversity at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, intact. <\/p>\n The court also recognized the validity of race-neutral methods to pursue diversity in the 1989 case J.A. Croson v. City of Richmond. In a concurring opinion filed in Students for Fair Admission (SFFA) v. Harvard, Justice Brett Kavanaugh quoted Justice Antonin Scalia\u2019s words from Croson: \u201cAnd governments and universities still \u2018can, of course, act to undo the effects of past discrimination in many permissible ways that do not involve classification by race.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n College Board\u2019s decision to ditch Landscape sends an incredibly problematic message: that tools to pursue diversity, even economic diversity, aren\u2019t worth defending due to the fear of litigation. If a giant like College Board won\u2019t stand behind its own perfectly legal effort to support diversity, what kind of message does that send? Regardless, colleges and universities need to remember their commitments to diversity, both racial and economic. Yes, post-SFFA, race-conscious admissions has been considerably restricted. Still, despite the bluster of the Trump administration, most tools commonly used to expand access remain legal.<\/p>\n The decision to kill Landscape is incredibly disappointing, both pragmatically and symbolically. It\u2019s a loss for efforts to broaden economic diversity at elite institutions, yet another casualty in the Trump administration\u2019s assault on diversity. Even if the College Board has decided to abandon Landscape, institutions must not forget their obligations to make higher education more accessible to low-income students of all races and ethnicities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Earlier this month, College Board announced its decision to kill Landscape, a race-neutral tool that allowed admissions readers to better understand a student\u2019s context for opportunity. After an awkward 2019 rollout as the \u201cAdversity Score,\u201d Landscape gradually gained traction in many selective admissions offices. Among other items, the dashboard provided information on the applicant\u2019s high<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23045,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[8227,1286,535,440,5551],"class_list":{"0":"post-23044","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-admissions","9":"tag-board","10":"tag-college","11":"tag-opinion","12":"tag-product"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23044\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}