News You Might Have Missed: 9/5/25

A collection of news and updates relating to admissions and testing over the last week.

A landscape of school fields—not exactly what the College Board had in mind. Photo by Zac Gudakov on Unsplash

The College Board Has Discontinued the Landscape Tool

In 2016, The College Board introduced a tool to help colleges identify the socioeconomic and demographic environment of individual high schools. This week, they made an announcement: “Landscape has been discontinued.”

Actually, that four word sentence is the third paragraph of a four-paragraph statement letting anyone who may care know they won’t find Landscape anymore. It was rather light on detail. The New York Times published an article that gives more explanation, largely citing the Department of Education’s recent crackdown on any possible loopholes for racial preferences in admissions. This is in the wake of the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision from the Supreme Court in 2023. The Times notes that SFFA was analyzing the Landscape tool.

In reality, the Landscape tool was never quite able to do what it was m…