The College Board Capitulates to Trump

Donald Trump has opened a new, terribly ill-advised battle in his war on affirmative action. His target is no longer just racial preferences, an issue where Trump had strong public support. Instead, Trump’s new enemy appears to be racial diversity itself—something most Americans support in educational settings when it is achieved by giving a break to the economically disadvantaged of all races. A Trump Department of Justice memorandum, for instance, has declared that “criteria like socioeconomic status, first-generation status, or geographic diversity must not be used” if a university’s goal is to further racial integration on campus. 

Given the president’s appalling history on matters of race, this development, while troubling, is not particularly surprising. What is mystifying is that a pillar of the higher education establishment recently went along with Trump. Earlier this month, the College Board, which administers the SAT, announced it would stop making a tool called Landscape available to colleges, which is designed to help identify high-achieving low-income students of all races. The organization cited as its reason the way in which “federal and state policy continues to evolve around how institutions use demographic and geographic information in admissions.” 

The decision represents the worst kind of capitulation. Landscape, as the College Board noted, “was intentionally developed without the use or consideration of data on race or ethnicity.” Instead, it allowed colleges to consider a student’s achievement in light of the socioeconomic makeup of his or her neighborhood and high school. Neighborhood factors included median family income, typical educational attainment, the share of families headed by a single parent, and crime rates. High school factors included the share of students eligible for subsidized lunch, the proportion taking AP exams, and the average SAT score. The idea was that if a student does pretty well academically despite these educational challenges, they have something special to offer. 

As a critic of racial preferences and a strong supporter of affirmative action based on economic class, I was enthusiastic about Landscape and proud of a small role in its development. I served as a sounding board as the College Board developed the tool. As an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions, which challenged racial preferences at Harvard, the University of North Carolina, and later the U.S. Naval Academy, I testified that looking at the socioeconomic status of neighborhoods and high schools was both fair and a good way of promoting racial and economic diversity without racial preferences. In September 2024, I favorably cited Landscape in my testimony for Students for Fair Admissions in the Naval Academy case, arguing that it was an important tool that could be used to promote racial diversity without racial preferences. 

After Donald Trump was elected in November 2024, the administration and conservative activists and thinkers sought to move the legal goalposts. Last month, Commentary magazine published a cover story by Naomi Schaefer Riley, the conservative writer, arguing that the College Board’s Landscape tool was a tool for racial discrimination.  

Riley was particularly suspicious that many of the factors that the College Board selected for Landscape—such as coming from a neighborhood with a high share of single-parent homes and with high crime rates—have a strong correlation with race. She noted: “In 2022, about 24 percent of white children were living in a home with only a mother, compared with 63 percent of all black children.” She was also dubious of employing crime statistics. “Incorporating crime rates by census tract into any admissions decisions, even controlling for income, will likely favor black students,” Riley wrote. She concluded that Landscape provided “a way to find out a student’s race without asking for it,” and “a way of surfacing race-based information surreptitiously.”  

This analysis is wrong on two fronts. To begin with, Riley’s notion that Landscape is a problem because it allows administrators to detect a student’s race is misplaced. There are much more efficient ways for admissions officers to know a student’s racial identity: through extracurriculars (are they a member of the Black Students Association?) and essays (what do they say when asked how they would contribute to a diverse student body?) The problem is not that admissions officers know a student’s race; it’s when they use that information to employ a racial preference. 

The second flaw in Riley’s analysis is that, as a matter of fairness, it’s relevant to consider whether a student grew up in a high-crime or low-crime area, or where a lot of their peers come from single-parent homes. As Raj Chetty and his colleagues have found, living in a neighborhood with a large share of single-parent households predicts opportunity in America. A student of any race who lives in such a neighborhood and nevertheless does fairly well shows grit and determination. The fact that, on average, Black students face this extra disadvantage is hardly a reason to ignore this factor. 

The irony is that while Riley thinks Landscape is a surreptitious route for achieving racial diversity, die-hard advocates of racial preferences fault it for the opposite reason. They worry that too many white and Asian students will benefit from race-neutral strategies. These supporters of racial preferences fault the economic approach for failing to help well-off Black and Hispanic students whom they believe bring important diversity to campus. Paradoxically, those of the far right and the far left, preoccupied by race, ignore larger issues of economic inequality.  

The College Board’s decision to jettison Landscape is particularly perplexing because a majority of Supreme Court justices were clear in their landmark 2023 decision, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, that using socioeconomic factors is perfectly legal. In his concurring opinion in the Students for Fair Admissions case, for example, Justice Neil Gorsuch pointed favorably to my expert testimony that “Harvard could nearly replicate the current racial composition of its student body without resorting to race-based practices if it: 1. provided socioeconomically disadvantaged applicants just half of the tip it gives recruited athletes; and 2. eliminated tips for the children of donors, alumni, and faculty.” 

In oral arguments before the Court over the use of race in admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the justices peppered Students for Fair Admissions about whether it would challenge policies like socioeconomic preferences as a form of proxy discrimination.  

In response, Patrick Strawbridge, a lawyer for Students for Fair Admissions, said that while SFFA would likely oppose “a pure proxy for race” such as a preference for the descendants of those who were enslaved, other programs—such as socioeconomic or geographic preferences—would be legal because there would be a “race-neutral justification” for adopting those plans. Strawbridge declared, “If the only reason to do it [adopt a race-neutral strategy] is through the narrow lens of race and there is no other race-neutral justification, that’s the only scenario where it would create problems.” The College Board’s Landscape tool can be justified on multiple grounds—as a way to pursue true merit (accomplishments in light of hurdles surmounted), to achieve the benefits of socioeconomic diversity, and to garner more ideological diversity (given America’s diploma divide in voting)—as well as to achieve more racial diversity. 

Since the 2023 SFFA decision, further evidence has emerged that a Landscape-like program is on solid legal ground. In 2024, when the Pacific Legal Foundation pressed the argument that using socioeconomic and geographic factors constitutes “proxy discrimination,” the Supreme Court twice turned down the opportunity to pursue that path. Over the vigorous dissents of the most conservative justices, the Court declined to hear a case involving Thomas Jefferson High School in Fairfax County, Virginia, in February and another involving the Boston Exam Schools in December. 

Given this, the real shame is that Democratic activists and politicians have not vocally challenged the College Board for its puzzling surrender. For years, Democrats were on the defensive on affirmative action, given the unpopularity of racial preferences. Now they (as well as Republicans and Independents) can champion a legally sound and politically popular approach to boost social mobility and racial integration. The silence is deafening. 

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