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Landscape™ provides consistent high school and neighborhood information for all applicants to help admissions officers fully consider every student, no matter where they live.

What Is Landscape?

This year, colleges will receive more than 10 million applications from students attending nearly 30,000 high schools. With more applications coming from more places, getting consistent, quality high school and neighborhood information for every applicant is getting harder. That’s why colleges asked us to develop this resource, and why we worked with admissions officers over a three-year period to create Landscape. Landscape provides consistent, data-driven information to help colleges do better what they've always done—understand an applicant's accomplishments in the context of the opportunities available to them.

About the Pilot

Over the last three years, the College Board has piloted the resource with colleges and universities, most recently through a research partnership with over 50 colleges. Over 90% of pilot participants reported that Landscape made it easier to incorporate contextual information about students and provided a more comprehensive view of the applicant.

Participating colleges affirmed that the information in Landscape provides important supplemental information for reading applications.

  • "Looking at the information in Landscape helped us fill in substantial gaps with objective, consistent data."

  • "Landscape helped our application review process by challenging some of the perceptions we had of certain areas and high schools. It allows us to use tangible and consistent information as context when considering a student's high school experience."

For the 2019–2020 admissions cycle, we're expanding our research partnership to a wider range of institutions interested in piloting Landscape to improve their admissions and scholarship review process. Access to Landscape will be free to partnering institutions.

For more information or to join the research partnership, email: [email protected].

Landscape Appropriate Usage Guidelines

All colleges using Landscape agree to adhere to the following appropriate use principles:

Colleges agree that:

  • Landscape is to be used only as supplemental information to the large amount of individual information contained in the application.
  • The general neighborhood and high school information will never replace student-specific application information.
  • The information in Landscape will never be used as a primary or sole determinant of an admission decision.

Colleges agree to:

  • Participate in collaborative research to improve the resource and track and understand the impact of its use on admissions, enrollment, and retention.
  • Ensure that all staff who review applications receive training on the appropriate use of Landscape.
  • Abide by the ethical standards set forth by the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) for the practice of admissions.

Download the Landscape Appropriate Usage Guidelines (.pdf/101 KB).

Resources

For more information or to join the research partnership, email: [email protected].