College Confidential is noted in the article 
Thanks for this,
I hope I donât sound ungratefulâreally I read this with interestâbut thereâs not much here that forum members will find thatâs new.
We can be prepared for a spate of articles like this one now that Rejection Season is well and truly upon us. Probably most will come just after Ivy Rejection Day.
The thesis statement of nearly all of them will be âGood God, what a messed up and painful system.â
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There were a couple of nuggets of info in the article. ie:
âThis year, in the absence of being told an applicantâs race and ethnicity, many selective colleges are employing a tool from the College Board called Landscape. It provides key data points about an applicantâs school and neighborhood, including average SAT scores, percentage of students eligible for free and reduced lunch, crime, and median family income, among other factors. Whatâs more, schools continue to consider student demographics when building their pool of applicants
âThe more applications they have, the easier it is for schools to meet their diversity goals, admissions deans told me. Thatâs why any effort to curtail application growth or the tactics colleges use to manage yield is met with resistance by colleges.
âRutgers University, for example, saw its application numbers grow by 60 percent in its first year on the Common App to more than 63,000.
IME high schools continue to tell kids not to apply to many colleges, but the second point above demonstrates how unwise that advice is, especially those that donât fit the social engineering goals of these colleges. Additionally highlights why many will continue to be test optional, as requiring tests will allow kids to quantify the requirements and not apply if scores are outside the range, and why many schools continue to not require supplemental essays.
As for Rutgers, just a data point, and reflective of what Iâve heard from instate applicants.
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Fair enough, and yes, the prominence of Landscape in admissions committeesâ thinking in the wake of the Supreme Court decision should especially be emphasized.
Iâve talked to some admissions officers in recent months, and itâs clear that Landscape is very much a primary category for them nowâmuch more than last year, even.
They always cared about high school profile, but now they have Landscape numbers front and center in their minds. So their brains go GPA/test scores/Landscape (etc.).
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I remain frustrated with the ex-missions from our public high school, seemingly stuck in the 1980âs college approachâŠso Iâm curious how a public school in a relatively affluent area, with a teachers union that keeps extraordinarily bad teachers employed, rates in this Landscape environment. Seems it would be dinged in multiple ways - lower gpaâs & less APs (compared to private schools), no dual credits - but also, low crime (!), nationally higher median income, fewer reduced lunch.
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I donât think students from schools in semi-affluent areas get any benefit from their Landscape profile. I see it as a tool for identifying kids from low SES/under-resourced school districts.
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I found the article interesting yet also consistent with what most of the coalescing advice on CC is for top schools (The article, as per most of these, centers on top schools):
-There is a first short read of the app to cull the list, confirming there are a majority of applicants who are not competitive. Other elites have stated in various podcasts and blogs that they do this as well. I do think this puts to rest the repetitive comments on CC about âalmost allâ applicants are competitive. They are not. Can most âdo the workâ? Maybe . But the fact is the majority are NOT deemed competitive on the first read, and the proportion of applicants who actually are competitive has gone way down in the TO/post covid application years, and Duke is not the first school to state it outright. I think grade inflation and lack of high schools providing rankings for students leads to way too many 3.9-4.0 uw students with 8+ APs thinking they are competitive yet have no idea what the truly competitive kids in their HS have on their transcripts: the solution would be more transparency in high school from teachers/college advising to the students, really letting them know how they compare so they can apply realistically .
-Guttentag (and other experienced staff) do the culling by looking at transcript first. This is what Yale, Dean J and others have said before: the transcript is the most important thing. Guttentag affirms the common wisdom on CC that your transcript is in context: what did you take relative to what is offered? And kids from less resourced schools (his NBA analogy) are assessed for potential more than performance, implying they have not had the same opportunity to show performance in a rigorous environment. This is all consistent with what Jeff Selingoâs book about Emory and Davidson admissions revealedâit is all about context of your HS. Guttentag explains he sorts and reads by high school: confirming relative ârankâ does matter, but it is not likely âclass rankâ by gpa, it is how your transcript stacks up against others in your HS, which is an important distinction. For schools that do rank , higher rank does not necessarily correlate with the better transcript. Colleges do not miss those details.
-The comments from Soule at Penn on how the sentence about research (from the summary Penn released on the admitted class of 2026) got twisted into âPenn requires researchâ is really eye opening. Though, in realityâŠalmost all Dâs Penn '27 Stem friends did do significant research(more than 9 months, with a phD, not pay-for -play, etc), including her.
-The Landscape data tool seems to be confirmed as the new way the colleges will get the diversity goals they seek, post supreme-court ruling. These schools still shape the class how they want with these metrics and others, meaning it is not and will never be the top Transcripts and stats over all else, and many truly competitive kids who DO easily cross the first cull will be waitlisted or rejected in the end.
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I suspect our high schoolâs policies(required regular sciences before AP sciences, pre-requisites for AP classes not found elsewhere, DE over AP, DE classes lacking an A+ on the scale, overall lack of AP classes or alternating years for AP) has seriously hurt us, and Iâm not sure how that would show up for an AO. Only some of these details make it into a school report but not all.
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With tens of thousands of applications, these schools have to be doing some type of arbitrary prescreening, possibly not even involving a human. This is what I suspect, and I feel like many kids are getting lost in that first screening. In the past, institutional priorities or holistic considerations could explain why somebody might not be considered. But with this many applications, Iâm not so sure anybody could fall back on that. They canât possibly read every application, so how are some making it to the read stack? This all feels very gamified in that some applicants were able to figure out the prescreening process while others were not. The lack of clarity is what bothers me the most.
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I am so curious about the Landscape tool, as far as âneighborhood infoâ, specifically. We live in a zip code, school district with a wide range of SES households. We have plenty of students who quality for free or reduced lunch, and plenty of very affluent families, too. Part of the town also shares a zip code with the very underperforming neighboring city high school. Closely examining by street address would be needed to to try to determine where an applicant lands on this scale. Anyone have any insight as to how granularly this tool is used?
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You can never be sure. For example, at our HS - in MA - APs are capped at 4 per year and they arenât allowed until junior year. Kids with highest rigor âonlyâ have 7/8 APs, but we regularly send kids to T20 schools.
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I would love to know exactly how they use this tool. Our district is in a severely impoverished and under resourced area and its surrounded by similarly situated districts. Any advantage that gives has not been seen by us, despite making a note on our applications that we just donât have access to certain classes and clubs found most places. I know that is anecdotal, but we have been stressed that our schools lack of resources has been a factor in rejections when it really should not, so I donât feel landscape has helped us at all. My guess is they use landscape for reasons other than school resources/socioeconomic factors, which donât apply to our region perhaps.
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I agree that it would be great to know how they use it. If it isnât to find deserving kids from under-represented/under-served areas, I think that is really unfortunate. I was under the impression that schools are on the lookout for talented kids from impoverished areas and Iâm sorry to hear that hasnât been your experience (or the experience of kids from your school).
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Thanks for posting this. I especially appreciate that every single year the boards fill up with people thinking their year is the craziest and most difficult, and this year we can really say ânope, this was the year that was the worstâ.
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This is another facet i would love to know more about and reinforces the lack of clarity issue- how do colleges use school info? There are schools that typically admit kids to certain colleges. What factors do colleges use to have a list of schools they like to pull from. How does an unknown school become one of these schools?
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Thatâs a good question. For example, our school has a much better acceptance rate at certain schools than the published numbers - and not just in ED. Two that come to mind are BC and Northeastern. Part of that is that we are local, but they do know our kids are well prepared and they get very good yield (again, probably because we are local).
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It will be interesting to see if there are any major shifts in demographics after this admissions season in terms of race, SES and geography. I also wonder how granular the AOâs will get with the Landscape data. Will it be just to identify students with great potential from low resource districts or will there be many gradations that create different standards for each applicant. I wonder if the students from the âaverageâ resourced districts will get the short end of the stick. The applicants from the well known highly resourced schools get a favorable assumption on rigor and level of preparedness and applicants from the low resourced districts get âin the contextâ bump, leaving applicants in the average districts with no bump and no favorable assumption.
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Many do not, and they are open about it: they do a real human first read. Duke used to do TWO real human reads of every app, before the number exploded in 2020. They used to do alumni admissions sessions in June, on campus, and they reviewed the basics, plus they and others have been interviewed or done podcasts or blogs on the nitty gritty of it. You really can figure out competitive-vs-not from a few minutes with the app. Some schools may use computer cuts but many elites do not, and pride themselves on human reads.
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My sons attended a small private high school that limited the number of AP classes a student could take. Students were accepted at competitive colleges. Usually at least one Ivy per class (graduating class of about 65-70) and many schools with acceptance rates under 20%.
The college advisors assured us that that was part of the high school profile that admission officers saw. The kids are evaluated against what was available to them. I am not sure racking up AP classes is a great advantage anyway.
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I agree. This part is the real mystery to me. Our HS gets about a handful into UNC OOS every year, unhooked, making it definitely âeasierâ than ivy/plus admits based on all the knowable factors of rigor, gpa, scores etc, but high schools with similar or slightly more ivy-type admissions never get anyone into UNC OOS.