The Commentary Magazine Podcast – "A COMMENTARY Win!"

Date: September 4, 2025
Host: John Podhoretz
Panelists: Abe Greenwald, Christine Rosen
Guest: Naomi Schaefer Riley (AEI Senior Fellow, Commentary contributor)
Main Theme: The exposure and rapid elimination of the College Board’s "Landscape" admissions tool, efforts to circumvent the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action, and the wider consequences for American higher education.

Episode Overview

This episode marks a celebratory moment for Commentary: Naomi Schaefer Riley’s in-depth reporting on the College Board’s "Landscape" tool led to its immediate withdrawal. The discussion centers on higher education’s reaction to the 2023 Supreme Court decision outlawing affirmative action, attempts to preserve racial preferences in admissions, and the way the College Board (makers of the SAT, AP exams, etc.) collaborates in these efforts. The conversation broadens to examine the opaque power of admissions bureaucracies and standardized testing companies, and philosophical questions about the purpose and future of higher education.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The College Board’s "Landscape" Tool and Its Demise

• Riley’s Investigation: Naomi Schaefer Riley authored a Commentary article ("College Board Games") uncovering how the College Board's "Landscape" tool provided universities with sociological data—at a census-tract level—about applicants, enabling a workaround to the Supreme Court's ban on considering race directly in admissions.
  • "You discerned in the behavior of the College Board... that the College Board might be involved in coming up with tools to help universities get around the ban on affirmative action." — John Podhoretz [04:49]
• Immediate Impact: The College Board eliminated the Landscape tool with barely any notice, attributing their move to wishing to avoid controversy.
  • "It was eliminated, effective immediately with very little notice. A very small note on the College Board website, but apparently they have decided they don’t want this fight." — Naomi Schaefer Riley [05:54]

2. How Landscape Worked: Coding for Race

• Proxies and Problems: Riley explains how "Landscape" covertly assigned a "socioeconomic disadvantage" profile using tricky proxies for race (e.g., home ownership, proximity to hospitals, school spending), minimizing poor white applicants.
  • "The question was, how do we sort of figure out what the race of the kid is based on everything we know about them from the census data?" — Naomi Schaefer Riley [08:24]
  • "In poor areas of Appalachia... you might have, like, a trailer home, but you own it. Whereas in the South Bronx, you’re very unlikely to own your apartment... Similarly, proximity to a medical facility..." — Naomi Schaefer Riley [08:58]

3. Persistence and Shape-Shifting of Affirmative Action

• Collegiate Resistance: Even after the Supreme Court’s ban, many colleges remain ideologically committed to "diversity" as a central virtue for their brands and their own parental sales pitches.
  • "Diversity as an end in itself in higher education has become so axiomatic over the last, say, two generations that it’s a selling point." — John Podhoretz [11:04]
• Gaming the System: The episode highlights how schools quickly adjusted presentations to avoid mentioning race after legal changes, masking continued commitment through euphemistic tools and language (pie charts replaced, literature censored with tape).
  • "I could have run, like, a randomized controlled trial here, but it was shocking how quickly those pie charts disappeared... running out of things to say..." — Naomi Schaefer Riley [15:20]

4. Affirmative Action’s Complex Fallout

• Statistical Workarounds: The group notes how, despite legal prohibitions, some colleges (e.g., Princeton) sustain exact levels of minority enrollment, suggesting continued use of alternative selection tools.
  • "Astonishingly, the same cannot be said of Princeton... a class with exactly the same ethnic and racial makeup..." — John Podhoretz [17:32]
• Industry and Quotas: Universities and an entire professional class (consultants, administrators) have a vested interest in perpetuating diversity metrics, even if achieving this means bending or skirting the rules.
  • "There’s an industry that’s sprouted up to ensure this... people who are trained to, you know, diversify institutions, and it's like now where do they go?” — John Podhoretz [22:18]

5. Opaqueness and Power of the College Board

• $11 Billion, Zero Transparency: The College Board profits enormously while remaining unaccountable to parents or the public about how its products are constructed or evaluated.
  • "This institution... is astoundingly opaque. It is as though we send our kids’ future into a black box." — John Podhoretz [33:02]
  • "The people who pay for it... do not know what it is that they’re getting for the money that they’re paying." — John Podhoretz [34:10]
• Testing and Adaptation: The SAT, AP, and associated products are increasingly non-transparent in content and scoring, with parents left powerless but eager for results.
  • "If you get a certain number of math questions right, then you get a harder test for the second half. A lot of it, I think, is not transparent, and it seems to be coming less transparent." — Naomi Schaefer Riley [34:51]

6. Wider Critiques of Modern Higher Education

• The Admissions “Conspiracy Against Parents”: The process is uniquely one-sided; parents and students are "supplicants," afraid to scrutinize or complain for fear of retribution.
  • "There is a conspiracy against the parents in which we are supplicating these institutions to which we are about to transfer... hundreds of thousands of dollars a year." — John Podhoretz [38:34]
• Shift to Employability Over Education: Colleges now market themselves as employment agencies, not intellectual institutions; practical, job-getting promises replace the old "educated citizen" ideal, especially as diversity becomes harder to quantify openly.
  • "They can’t talk about diversity anymore in the same way... Now they talk about jobs. ‘We are going to get your kid a job after college. Don't you worry.’” — John Podhoretz [41:30]
  • "These schools are no longer interested in promising parents that when their kids get out of school, they will be educated." — John Podhoretz [43:16]

7. Affirmative Action Consequences for Minority Students

• Mismatch Problem: Over-placement of students via affirmative action leads many high-promise students to struggle or change majors, missing out on the practical benefits such as STEM degrees.
  • "What all these studies show is that black kids who end up going to schools where their SAT scores are too low... end up having to drop out or switch into majors that are not going to be as well paying." — Naomi Schaefer Riley [53:07]
• The “Veil of Suspicion”: Policy undermines the achievements of all minority students, as their merit is called into question.
  • "The flip side of this... is it also calls into question the remarkably talented non white people who did get in on their own merits. Their merit is also undermined by affirmative action... the veil of suspicion that affirmative action policy casts on all of those people is also bad." — Christine Rosen [56:47]

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Landscape’s sudden demise:
  "Apparently it was so terrifying to have sunlight shown on this tool that the College Board had developed that they quickly threw in the garbage can." — John Podhoretz [07:16]

• On colleges’ admissions marketing:
  "They would show pie charts and bar graphs... whoever was giving the presentation came from that particular group that they wanted to emphasize." — Naomi Schaefer Riley [13:57]

• On the futility of diversity as educational justification:
  "Show me a single piece of evidence that says that it matters what the race is of the person sitting next to you in your classroom is for your ability to get a better education." — Philip Kurland, cited by John Podhoretz [28:46]

• On the discriminatory consequence of proxies:
  "The proxies do everything it possibly can to minimize bringing in kids... from poorer white populations." — Christine Rosen [07:46]

• On the irony of the current vocational focus:
  "Their purpose became diversity, their purpose became social justice. Now their purpose more vocationally would be give us the money and we’ll be an employment agency for you." — John Podhoretz [52:17]

Timestamps for Important Segments

• [05:54]: College Board’s Landscape tool eliminated – Naomi explains the context and meaning.
• [08:24]–[10:38]: How the Landscape tool used census tract proxies to surreptitiously encode race.
• [15:20]: Naomi’s anecdote on Harvard’s rushed adjustment of admissions literature post-SCOTUS ruling.
• [17:32]: Puzzle over Princeton’s "magically" unchanged racial ratios after the SCOTUS decision.
• [33:02]–[34:51]: The College Board’s power, opacity, and financial interests.
• [41:30]: Shift from diversity to vocational boasting in college tours.
• [53:07]–[54:21]: Affirmative action’s negative impact on underprepared students (the "mismatch" effect).
• [56:29]–[57:17]: "Veil of suspicion" on minority student achievement and the growing problem of remedial education.

Tone & Style Notes

• Language: Brisk, conversational, often wryly humorous, sometimes acerbically critical, with clear expertise and insider knowledge.
• Tone: Mix of intellectual rigor, cynicism about institutions, and genuine concern for students and the future of education.

Takeaway

This episode stands as a testament to the power of investigative journalism: Commentary’s exposure of the College Board’s evasive program achieved an immediate policy effect. More broadly, the discussion dismantles illusions about both the motives and operations of modern higher education, revealing a landscape where bureaucratic inertia, institutional self-interest, and rhetorical doublespeak conspire against transparency and genuine intellectual engagement.

The fight over race, merit, and class in college admissions is far from over; the methods may change, but the incentives for institutions to maintain appearances—by any means possible—remain powerful and deeply entrenched.