Students for Fair Admissions Urges Treasury and IRS to Close “Geographic Location” Loophole in Proposed Rule on Tax-Exempt Private Schools
SFFA comment warns that ZIP codes and neighborhood data are being used as race proxies to evade the Supreme Court’s ruling in SFFA v. Harvard
For Immediate Release:
September 17, 2026
Contact:
Edward Blum
703-505-1922
edwardjayblum@gmail.com
(Ft Worth, Texas) – Today, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) submitted a formal comment to the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service on their proposed rule, REG-119986-25, which would bar tax-exempt private schools from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national or ethnic origin.
The comment is attached.
SFFA was the plaintiff in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 600 U.S. 181 (2023) in which the Supreme Court ended the use of racial classifications and preferences in college admissions. The proposed IRS rule is based principally on that decision.
In its comment, SFFA praised the rule’s core principle that a school engaging in racial discrimination in any of its policies or programs cannot retain its 501(c)(3) status.
SFFA also identified a significant vulnerability in how the rule may be applied in practice.
The Department has stated that schools may continue to use race-neutral criteria such as family income, geographic location, first-generation status, individual hardship, military family status, and academic achievement.
SFFA’s comment argues that one item on that list — “geographic location” — is fundamentally different from the others, because an applicant’s address or neighborhood is frequently the most predictive proxy for race for the applicant’s race.
The comment cites the College Board’s “Landscape” tool, an adversity-scoring instrument built from neighborhood- and school-level data that closely tracked race without expressly identifying it. Schools used to increase nonwhite enrollment after the SFFA decision. The College Board discontinued Landscape in 2025 without public explanation.
SFFA also points to Association for Education Fairness v. Montgomery County Maryland Board of Education, now pending on a petition for certiorari before the Supreme Court. In that case, a Maryland school district allegedly replaced a test-based magnet admissions process with a neighborhood-weighted process after being told how the change would affect the racial composition of admitted students.
SFFA argues that a private school that assigns weight to applicant’s ZIP code, census tract, or neighborhood in order to engineer a racial outcome is discriminating on the basis of race under any sensible reading of the tax regulations governing 501(c)(3) status.
SFFA’s comment recommends that the Department’s final rule, or its preamble, expressly state two things: first, that a facially neutral criterion such as a geographic location or a home address if adopted or applied with the purpose of favoring or disfavoring applicants on the basis of race, color, or national or ethnic origin constitutes discrimination under the rule regardless of how the criterion is labeled; and second, that evidence that a school selected, weighted, or calibrated a geographic variable based on its correlation with race, or measured its success by the resulting class’s racial composition, is evidence of discriminatory purpose.
Edward Blum, president of SFFA, said, “Without clear guardrails, this rule’s own list of acceptable criteria could become a roadmap for the very discrimination the Supreme Court outlawed. We are asking Treasury and the IRS to clarify this critically important distinction.”