For the record, I think that the time spent “reverse engineering the SAT landscape” for your neighborhood would be better spent focusing on other aspects of the application process, but to answer your question about “Any interviews anyone has heard about how colleges are using it or which colleges are using it?” …
They mention Landscape in the Inside the Yale Admissions Office podcast, in episode 36. Also, Opportunity Atlas.
MARK: Thing number two, beginning this fall, admissions officers are going to incorporate a new place based data element from something called Opportunity Atlas. I’m a data wonk guy, so I’m really excited about this. Opportunity Atlas is an ambitious nationwide mapping project run by some economists, and it measures economic mobility at the census tract level.
The data that we get from this are going to complement a bunch of other race neutral place-based data points that are included in a tool that’s called landscape that we’ve used from the College Board now for many years, and this is great because it gives us some excellent insights about where a student has grown up and where they go to school.
JEREMIAH QUINLAN: And I think this is important to understand, even though we are, as we discussed earlier, losing the opportunity and ability to consider one element of a student’s identity, we are going to still be able to consider so many different contextual elements of their background, their neighborhood, the high school they attend, whether if they’re the first in their family to attend college, whether they’re a low income student, whether they’re applying from a neighborhood that has a particularly low level of economic mobility over time. We’ve considered most of these things in the past, and we look forward to considering them, frankly, even more closely than we have in this new landscape.