In August 2019, the College Board announced it was launching a program providing higher education institutions with “context about students’ high schools and neighborhoods when making admissions decisions.” In August 2019, the College Board announced it was launching “Landscape,” a program providing higher education institutions with “context about students’ high schools and neighborhoods when making admissions decision.” Landscape collects and organizes data into three categories—basic high school data, such as school locale, test score comparison, and high school and neighborhood indicators—that offers insight into high schools and neighborhoods. Among these indicators are quintessential measures of socioeconomic status, including college attendance, household structure, median family income, housing stability, education levels, and crime rate. To provide admissions officials with “more consistent background information so they can fairly consider every student, no matter where they live and learn,” these six indicators are averaged and presented on a 1–100 scale for both a student’s high school and neighborhood. A higher score represents a “higher level of challenge related to educational opportunities and outcomes”; a lower score indicates less of a challenge in attaining academic success.
This Note addresses potential Fourteenth Amendment challenges to the new Landscape profile. Although the College Board’s efforts are laudable, Landscape raises several constitutional questions because of its socioeconomic classification system and similarity to past affirmative action programs that were challenged on Equal Protection grounds. Before turning to these issues, Part I provides a descriptive overview of Landscape and discusses the program’s origin, evolution, and methodology. Part I concludes by summarizing the prevailing criticisms of Landscape’s rating system, which some have called an “adversity score.”
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