On September 2, 2025, College Board announced they will discontinue their Landscape program, designed for colleges to find low-income, high-achieving students, citing federal and state policy changes. College Board is the business that administers standardized testing exams such as Advanced Placement and the SAT.
Low-income students have historically been at a disadvantage in college admissions due to financial hardships. To help these students, the majority of colleges account for the environment students grow up in, both in terms of family life and community (high school, neighborhood, etc.), also known as holistic admissions. Universities look to admit low-income, high-achieving students to improve student diversity on campus, and many have been using Landscape as a tool to find these students.
Landscape supports holistic admissions by giving colleges information on students’ environments, including socioeconomic factors such as household relationships, income, and parents’ education. A 2022 Brookings Institute study found that Landscape slightly increased admissions chances for disadvantaged students, but did not increase the enrollment of such students. However, the end of Landscape could affect equitable admissions for low-income students.
While College Board’s only explicit reasoning for the cancellation was the changes in federal and state policy about how institutions demographic and geographic information in college admissions. This follows the Trump administration threatening funding for schools that have DEI initiatives and a 2023 Supreme Court decision banning the consideration of race in admissions. Recently, the same group that sued Harvard and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill for their consideration of race in admissions, Students for Fair Admissions, reviewed the Landscape program. They accused the Landscape program of being another tool for colleges to consider race, though College Board stated that Landscape "was intentionally developed without the use or consideration of data on race or ethnicity.”
For most, the end of Landscape means little. But, for students from lower-income families or areas, it removes one of the few tools that helped highlight their achievements in context. Without programs like Landscape, admissions officers would struggle to properly assess how well a student performed compared to the opportunities they had: a student who went to a top ranking high school and performed average may appear better than a talented student at a disadvantaged high school that offered only a few AP classes and clubs.
South Carolina could feel the impact of this more than others, as SC ranks below average for household income and educational resources, meaning many students may rely on holistic admissions for a fair chance.
While this is only one program, its discontinuation reflects a shift away from holistic admissions which would affect hundreds of thousands, if not millions of students.
By Jackson Cline
Founder, Editor-in-Chief