September 7, 2025
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, called 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 that schools use to find minority applicants.
It is, however, unclear if that is indeed the purpose for which the program was developed and applied by colleges and universities. Regardless, the Landscape program 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 shutter 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 and he also indicated that individual justices on the Supreme Court noted that the socioeconomic status of students is an acceptable way to increase diversity on the campuses of American universities.
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, they discovered that the chances of admission increased for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, however, the chance of enrollment for those same students did not change after universities utilized the Landscape tool, which they noted is consistent with other research. As their report plainly stated, “While there is an association between race and class, neither is an accurate proxy for the other.”
In essence, their conclusion casts doubt on the Trump administration and Students for Fair Admissions’ claim that there are “hidden racial proxies” at play in the admissions process engendered by utilizing a race-neutral system like Landscape.
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.
As investigative journalist Meredith Kolodner noted in a May 2025 article for The Hechinger Report, this move, which compounds with the College Board’s earlier decision to end its award program for high-performing Black and Latinx students threatens to shift substantial funds from those often disadvantaged groups to typically more affluent white students.
According to Wil Del Pilar, senior vice president at the left-leaning policy and advocacy group EdTrust, “It’s a move towards race-blind categories when we know that education and access to education isn’t race-blind. We can’t really have a conversation around merit if we’re not all at the same starting point in terms of what we receive from our K-12 education and how we’re able to navigate the test prep environment, or the lack of test prep that certain communities receive.”
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