On Thursday, President Trump signed an executive order mandating that colleges and institutions provide the U.S. Department of Education with increased admissions data. The action is meant to show whether colleges are still giving preference to race in admissions even after the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action in 2023. It is the most recent blow in the administration’s campaign against diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) policies.
The memo dated Thursday states “the lack of available admissions data from universities paired with the rampant use of” diversity statements “and other overt and hidden racial proxies continues to raise concerns about whether race is actually used in admissions decisions in practice.”
Every college and institution that takes part in the federal student loan program is already obliged to provide the department with specific information regarding financial aid, enrollment, and graduation rates. The action taken on Thursday would force them to provide more information about both the pupils they enroll and those who apply. The government thinks it can use this information to crack down on institutions that might still be giving applicants’ race more weight than their academic performance.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon instructed the National Center for Education Statistics to start gathering more information from schools on their applicants shortly after the memo was made public. “Institutions of higher education will now have to report data disaggregated by race and sex,” according to a release from the department. The data “will include quantitative measures of applicants’ and admitted students’ academic achievements such as standardized test scores, GPAs and other applicant characteristics.”
“We will not allow institutions to blight the dreams of students by presuming that their skin color matters more than their hard work and accomplishments,” McMahon stated in a statement. “The Trump Administration will ensure that meritocracy and excellence once again characterize American higher education.”
“This is a fishing expedition,” argues Ted Mitchell, the former Obama administration undersecretary of education and head of the American Council on Education (ACE). Since admissions offices have always taken into account factors other than academics, Mitchell claims the department is casting “a really big net” and that it will be challenging to sort through the abundance of new data.
“We have referral letters for this reason. For this reason, whether someone has played on a sports team or is a cellist matters to us. “Because we want to better understand the meaning of those numbers,” Mitchell explains. “All [the Supreme Court] said was, you can’t use race as a determining factor, even though they also said diversity is really important.”
When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down racial admissions in higher education in 2023, the country’s most elite universities were forced to find a new, legal approach to keep accepting a diverse student body. According to Chief Justice John Roberts, “nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life.” This means that applicants can still discuss race in their admissions essays.
According to recent settlement agreements, both Brown University and Columbia University must disclose each applicant’s race, color, test results, and grades. “Columbia may not, by any means, unlawfully preference applicants based on race, color, or national origin in admissions,” Columbia’s settlement stated. It additionally forbids “personal statements, diversity narratives, or any applicant reference to racial identity as a means to introduce or justify discrimination.”
“The Trump Administration is successfully reversing the decades-long woke-capture of our nation’s higher education institutions,” McMahons said in a statement following the Brown agreement, which is very similar to Columbia’s, adding that “aspiring students will be judged solely on their merits, not their race or sex.”
Only about 200 of the approximately 4,000 colleges and institutions in the United States are regarded as being extremely selective. It’s unclear if the Trump administration will still mandate that all educational institutions—community colleges, for instance—gather and report this extra data.
Researchers at Georgetown University conducted simulations two years ago to examine the potential outcomes of eliminating race from college admissions. They concluded that, absent “a fundamental redesign of the college admissions system,” which would involve doing away with legacy and sports recruitment, a nationwide prohibition would result in a reduction in the ethnic diversity of students attending selective universities.
The nation’s selective colleges saw a wide range of enrollment changes in the fall of 2024, when they welcomed their first freshman class after the Supreme Court’s decision. While some, like Yale University and Princeton University, saw little change, others, like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Amherst College, witnessed significant declines in their proportion of Black students.
The Education Department’s ability to gather, handle, and evaluate the influx of new data or to take action against institutions it feels violate its merit-based admissions standards is unclear. The department now employs about half as many people as it did six months ago due to a series of layoffs and departures.
According to Jason Cottrell, a member of AFGE Local 252, a union of department employees, and a former data coordinator for the Education Department’s Office of Postsecondary Education, “this isn’t flipping a switch or typing something up and saying, ‘Just do it,'” “They no longer have the resources to complete it, and it will take a lot of time. We’re all gone.
This report was aided by Elissa Nadworny.
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