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The College Board Capitulates to Trump
The organization’s decision to abandon a race-neutral tool to recruit high-achieving low-income students is unconscionable.
by Richard D. Kahlenberg
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.
Read Online.
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.
Richard D. Kahlenberg is Director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute and author of Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges. |