The Supreme Court Banned Race Sorting. Colleges Found a 5-Digit Loophole

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On Sept. 16, Students for Fair Admissions filed a comment letter with the Treasury Department and the IRS, warning that “geographic location,” a factor Treasury listed as an acceptable race-neutral criterion in its proposed rule on tax-exempt private schools, has become the preferred hiding place for the discrimination the court outlawed in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. I’ve spent decades advising fiduciaries on the gap between what a policy says on paper and what it actually does. This is a case study in that gap.

Here’s the mechanism, and it isn’t subtle once you see it. A student’s home address maps to a census tract. The census tract maps to a school district, a median income, a housing stock, and, in an awful lot of American neighborhoods, a racial composition that hasn’t moved much since the last century. Feed an applicant’s zip code into an admissions algorithm, and you’ve built a race classifier that never has to say the word race. The College Board figured this out years ago with a tool called Landscape, an “adversity score” built from median family income, educational attainment, single-parent households, and neighborhood crime rates. Researchers who studied the tool found it nudged admissions decisions toward applicants from disadvantaged schools, and analysts have since tied it to shifts in campus racial composition at schools like Yale in the first cycles after the Harvard ruling. The College Board quietly retired the product in 2025 after SFFA started asking pointed questions about exactly that correlation. Nobody kills a moneymaker that’s perfectly legal.

The public sector picked up where Landscape left off. In Montgomery County, Maryland, school officials swapped a test-based magnet admissions process for one weighing an applicant’s home and neighborhood, after being briefed in advance on exactly how the switch would change the racial makeup of the incoming class. That case now sits at the Supreme Court. The justices, to their credit, saw this coming. In the Harvard opinion, they wrote that “what cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly,” and that schools “may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.” A zip code is just a longer essay.

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