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 the SAT exam, to identify promising high school students from disadvantaged neighborhoods and schools.
This 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.
The College Board declined requests for interviews or additional information about what led to the cancellation.
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 on Thursday 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,” Mr. 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. Richard D. Kahlenberg, who served as an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions, said he viewed the decision as unfortunate.
“It is race-neutral and its use is perfectly legal,” said Mr. Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute. He noted that in fact, several of the justices who decided the Students for Fair Admissions case pointed to consideration of socioeconomic factors as a permissible way of promoting diversity.
From the beginning, the College’s Board’s effort to weigh students’ relative disadvantage — at first, widely referred to as the “adversity score” — was controversial.
The College Board rolled out the tool in 2019, and initially scored students on a scale of 1 to 100, with higher scores going to students who faced more socioeconomic challenges in their neighborhoods and schools.
Some middle-class and affluent parents worried that the adversity rating would effectively lower the value of their children’s SAT scores in college admissions officers’ eyes.
But the College Board said its intention was simply to provide more context for each applicant.
The tool included data on the environment in which a student lived and attended school, but did not consider data from the student’s individual household. That caused some critics to complain that it offered a leg up to affluent gentrifiers who lived in predominantly low-income communities, by creating the impression that their children had overcome more disadvantage than was actually present in the home.
The tool never considered race, in part because even before the Supreme Court overturned affirmative action in 2023, some states had already banned the practice.
The College Board quickly stopped giving students a single adversity score, and renamed the entire effort Landscape. Admissions officers could analyze dozens of data points regarding a student’s environment, including apartment turnover rates and the percentage of students at their high school who took Advanced Placement exams.
A 2022 study of Landscape found that while it had marginally increased admissions offers for students from disadvantaged neighborhoods and schools, it did not increase actual enrollment of these students, except in cases where the colleges used the tool to help shape financial aid offers.
That finding pointed to the fact that for low-income students, admission is not the only barrier to attending a selective college.
“The hope was to affect enrollment decisions on the margins, not dramatically reshuffle which students were going to enroll,” said Zack Mabel, an author of the study and a former researcher at the College Board, where he helped develop Landscape.
Dr. Mabel is now director of research at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. He said he was not surprised to see the College Board withdraw Landscape, considering the pressure on higher education from the Trump administration. He noted that the College Board is an organization that serves its members — universities — and that those members are under intense political and legal scrutiny related to diversity and equity practices.
Canceling Landscape is “a politically savvy move to avoid risk,” he said.
Neither the College Board nor individual universities have generally disclosed whether they used the Landscape tool, which was offered free to colleges as a bonus in a widely used package of College Board admissions features.
A similar tool was created by a Harvard-based nonprofit group called Opportunity Insights. Mr. Kahlenberg said its data is slightly more complicated because, unlike the College Board’s Landscape, it considers the racial makeup of neighborhoods.
John N. Friedman, an economics professor at Brown University who co-directs Opportunity Insights, said its goal was to use data to “understand where children in America have fewer opportunities to rise up.” He added, “We hope this tool can continue to help policymakers working in college admissions and other areas to expand opportunity.”
Yale, whose first-year class last year avoided the declines in Black and Hispanic student enrollment that were seen at some of its peer institutions, is among the universities that have used the Opportunity Insights tool, which is called Opportunity Atlas.
Other schools that did see declines in enrollment of underserved minorities said last fall that they were exploring using such tools. One such school was Johns Hopkins University, where Black students made up 5.7 percent of its entering class last year, down from 13.7 percent a year earlier. The president of Johns Hopkins, Ron Daniels, referred specifically to the College Board’s Landscape tool.
The data included in Landscape was all publicly available through government websites, but without the convenience of the online dashboard, some schools would probably not sift through it.
All of these efforts to attract diverse student bodies appear now to be risky, as the Trump administration pursues investigations, lawsuits and executive orders to tamp down on equity efforts.
Dr. Mabel of Georgetown said he expected a reduction in the diversity of students enrolled at selective colleges, unless the courts clarify that it is legal for colleges to consider socioeconomic factors in admissions.
Until then, he said, “they will revert back to practices that tend to privilege students already coming from more privileged backgrounds.”
Stephanie Saul reports on colleges and universities, with a recent focus on the dramatic changes in college admissions and the debate around diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education.
Dana Goldstein covers education and families for The Times.
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