College Board Quietly Axes Tool To Help Colleges Identify High-Achieving, Disadvantaged Students

In the wake of the Supreme Court's sunset of affirmative action and the Trump administration's subsequent attacks on DEI, enrollment numbers of Black and Latinx students have decreased.

The College Board has quietly discontinued a tool that helped universities identify high-achieving students from disadvantaged schools and neighborhoods, following the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling striking down race-based affirmative action.

That program, Landscape, does not search by race, but instead allows universities to search various categories related to the socioeconomic status of students across the country to allow universities to identify talented, but overlooked and under-resourced students in order to broaden their base of academic talent.

According to The New York Times, the move to shutter the program comes less than a month after the White House indicated it would be cracking down on alleged “hidden racial proxies,” which it alleges schools use to find minority applicants.

Though it is unclear if that is the purpose for which the program was developed and used, Landscape had been the subject of a review by the same conservative activist group responsible for challenging affirmative action before the Supreme Court, Students for Fair Admissions.

Like the decisions of some businesses to cancel their diversity, equity and inclusion commitments, and the reformation or cancellation of diversity, equity and inclusion departments by universities, the College Board’s decision seems guided by an instinct to avoid legal battles and lawsuits.

Interestingly enough, Richard D. Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, who also once served as an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions, believes the choice to close the program is a misstep by the College Board.

“It is race-neutral and its use is perfectly legal,” he told the New York Times.

According to a statement that the College Board, a non-profit entity, provided to Reuters, “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.”

In a 2022 study by the Brookings Institute, the chances of admission increased for students from disadvantaged backgrounds but the chance of enrollment for those same students did not change after universities used Landscape tool, which it noted is consistent with other research.

“While there is an association between race and class, neither is an accurate proxy for the other,” the report said. .

What is evident, however, is that in the wake of the Supreme Court’s sunset of affirmative action and the Trump administration’s subsequent attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion, the enrollment numbers of Black and Latinx students have decreased both at the undergraduate and graduate program levels.