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Now, Uncle Sam is poised to scrutinize admissions data like never before. The controversial deal Columbia University struck with the Trump administration last week includes a provision that will subject the university to regular examination of its admissions numbers for the next three years. And the agreement requires Columbia to turn over data that goes beyond what the federal government already requires colleges to submit.
According to the terms of the deal, each fall Columbia will share data — “broken down by race, color, grade-point average, and performance on standardized tests” — on all rejected and admitted applicants with a jointly chosen independent monitor. (Federal law distinguishes between “race” and “color,” which refers to skin color, pigmentation, or complexion.) That trove of information on applicants, the agreement says, will be “subjected to a comprehensive audit.”
The unprecedented arrangement offers a powerful reminder: Scrutiny of admissions outcomes has only intensified since the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, which bars institutions from considering applicants’ racial status. The age-old debate over fairness in admissions has morphed into demands for more data and expressions of distrust in colleges’ faithfulness to the law.
The agreement comes four months after the Justice Department announced that it was investigating whether Stanford University and three University of California campuses were violating the Supreme Court’s ruling by continuing to consider applicants’ race — a practice that the state banned at all public institutions nearly 30 years ago. The “compliance review,” the U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi, said in a written statement, is “just the beginning” of a push to “eliminate DEI” in admissions.
“It appears that the government’s motivation is to follow the Harvard case right down to the microscopic details — to ensure that institutions claiming to be race-neutral really are,” said Peter F. Lake, director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University College of Law. “The government is planting itself right at the table in the admissions office, which had once been a pretty sacrosanct space.”
The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment about how Columbia’s data will be evaluated and why the government wants data on GPAs and test scores for admitted and rejected applicants. But some admissions experts suspect that the Trump administration is setting the stage for future litigation.
“The government wants to monitor how many students of color are admitted at institutions,” said Angel B. Pérez, chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, known as NACAC. “The concern is that if any institution does not admit a certain number of white students, the Trump administration is going to sue them. It’s deeply disturbing.”
Columbia’s agreement states that the government lacks authority to dictate its admission decisions. But another passage says that no part of the agreement prevents the Trump administration from “conducting subsequent compliance reviews, investigations, or litigation into Columbia’s future admissions practices to ensure that those practices are in full compliance with all applicable laws and not a proxy for prohibited discrimination.”
The door to more federal intervention appears wide open.
When it comes to admissions data, though, institutions have long embraced semitransparency, sharing some, but far from all, of the information they compile. That limits what the public can see, what researchers can study, what policymakers can propose.
What we’re seeing now is the administration turning the idea of discrimination on its head.
All institutions without open admissions that participate in federal financial-aid programs are required to submit large chunks of internal data regularly to the National Center for Education Statistics, or NCES. That federal agency manages the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or IPEDS. The data IPEDS makes publicly available includes the total number of applicants at a given college, the percentage who were admitted, and the percentage who enrolled. Each of those categories is broken down by gender.
Pull up College Navigator, the free online tool run by NCES, and you’ll find information about each institution’s incoming class, including the number of students who submitted ACT and SAT scores (at test-optional colleges) and the score ranges for those who ultimately enrolled. You will also see percentage breakdowns of incoming classes by gender, race, and ethnicity.
Such metrics can be helpful, but the search for meaning in them is fraught with caveats. “When you just look at enrollment numbers, you’re looking at the end result of this whole process,” said James Murphy, director of career pathways and postsecondary policy at Education Reform Now, a nonprofit advocacy group.
To understand what Murphy means, let’s pick a random college — say, Duke University. The institution announced last fall that it had accepted 4.4 percent of its applicants. Of the 1,739 students in its incoming class, 14 percent, or 243, were Latino.
But Duke’s announcement didn’t say how many Latino students applied or how many were accepted, which would provide context for its enrollment numbers. Colleges traditionally haven’t disclosed such information; IPEDS hasn’t collected it.
But changes are coming. Later this year, NCES will start collecting disaggregated data on the race and ethnicity of each college’s applicants and the students it admits — not just on the students who end up enrolling. Education-policy wonks and college-access groups have pushed for that change, arguing that it would enable better research on equity in admissions outcomes.
Recently, the Urban Institute — along with the Association for Undergraduate Education at Research Universities and the University of Southern California’s Center for Enrollment Research, Policy, and Practice — set out to fill the gap in publicly available enrollment data. The organization collected information from 18 research universities on the race and ethnicity of applicants, admits, and students who enrolled between 2018 and 2024.
The Urban Institute’s preliminary analysis found trends that varied by race and ethnicity. And it revealed nuances enrollment data alone could not. Since 2018, the share of white students in the applicant, admit, and enrolled pools decreased consistently, for instance; their share of the applicant pool fell to 40 percent, down from 48 percent. Yet white students were the only racial subgroup that made up a larger share of admitted students than applicants, by a margin of 6 to 9 percentage points, each year.
Better data can help illuminate what’s happening within the admissions pipeline at particular colleges, says Murphy, at Education Reform Now. He imagines a state legislator looking at a flagship university at which the enrollment of Black students lags behind that of other state institutions.
The legislator might wonder: Is the problem that too few Black students are applying to the university? That too few are being admitted? That too few of those admitted are choosing to enroll? Or all of the above?
“Colleges have this data, but it’s fair to say we can’t simply rely on institutions to put the public’s priorities before their own,” Murphy said. “It’s important to be able to shine a light on where institutions are falling down, where they might need support, and where they might need nudging. The more data we have, the better. If we care about measures of accountability in admissions, then we need a more complete picture of the process.”
And don’t forget Edward Blum, president of Students for Fair Admissions, known as SFFA, and the architect of the lawsuits that ended race-conscious admissions. Last September, SFFA sent letters to Duke, Princeton, and Yale Universities stating that the organization was “deeply concerned” that the institutions were flouting the Supreme Court’s ruling on race-conscious admissions.
Why? Because, after the first admissions cycle following the Supreme Court’s decision, Princeton and Yale reported smaller declines in Black and Latino freshmen than other highly selective colleges did; Duke reported an increase in both. And all three colleges reported declines in Asian American freshmen in contrast with many of their peer institutions, which had seen increases.
SFFA’s letters urged each of those institutions to explain that “discrepancy” and describe any race-neutral strategies that they might have recently adopted. “Without that information,” Blum wrote, “SFFA will conclude that you are circumventing the Supreme Court’s decision. SFFA is prepared to enforce Harvard against you through litigation. You are now on notice.”
In an environment in which activists and federal officials see only some enrollment outcomes as acceptable, plausible, or legally sound, a college’s enrollment numbers can seem radioactive.
Pérez, at NACAC, says admissions deans at some highly selective colleges have told him they feel stuck between a rock and a hard place with regard to data: “If they enroll fewer students of color than last year, their internal constituents — the faculty and the alumni — are going to be angry, but then if they admit more, they’re possibly going to get sued. It’s an impossible position to be in.”
The independent monitor that will audit Columbia’s admissions data will see more than the final freshman-enrollment numbers. Still, one can glean only so much by looking only at the standardized-test scores, GPAs, and race and ethnicity of both admitted and rejected applicants. For one thing, there will be a bajillion students with stellar grades and test scores among the latter group at a university that accepts just 4 percent of applicants.
But let’s think about what will be missing. The examination of Columbia’s admission data apparently won’t include some important information on the academic caliber of the high schools applicants attended, the extracurricular projects they pursued, or the leadership experiences they gained.
Nor does it seem that the assessment will include information about which students were recruited athletes, which were legacies, which were prospective first-generation college students, which were eligible for federal Pell Grants, or which wrote especially memorable personal statements. Nor will it apparently factor in students’ intended majors — or even their genders.
Those are just some of the variables that highly selective colleges such as Columbia might consider in addition to GPAs and standardized-test scores when selecting a freshman class. That’s how a holistic review process works. Like it or not, it’s still legal to conduct comprehensive evaluations of applicants’ academic performance along with their personal qualities and achievements.
The challenge for such colleges is that critics of race-conscious admissions programs have long nurtured the idea that only grades and test scores, especially the latter, are true measures of merit, a word that keeps popping up.
Columbia’s agreement says that the university “shall maintain merit-based admissions policies.” It echoes the Justice Department’s recent statement announcing the investigation of the four California colleges, in which Attorney General Bondi wrote that “President Trump and I are dedicated to ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity across the country.”
It’s not that difficult to imagine a skeptical examiner concluding that a given college had engaged in discrimination just by rejecting some white and Asian American students with higher SAT scores than some Black and Latino applicants who received acceptances, is it?
Liliana M. Garces, a professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Texas at Austin, has studied race-based disparities in higher education. “What we’re seeing now is the administration turning the idea of discrimination on its head,” she said. “They’re saying that you’re deserving or meritorious if you look a particular way, that if a college has too many students of color, somehow that they’re not getting in on their own merit.”
But there’s no universal definition of merit, no singular metric for assessing achievement, as many admissions experts will tell you.
“Universities have a right to determine their mission, who to admit and how to do that within the bounds of the Constitution,” Garces said. “Colleges get to define merit according to their institutional missions, especially with regard to standardized testing, which we know is fraught with disparities. The administration is trying to interfere with that process and insert its own determination of what they consider to be ‘meritorious’ without reference to what institutions are trying to accomplish.”
Lake, at Stetson, suspects that the deepening scrutiny of admissions outcomes will change the way some colleges evaluate applicants: “I hate to say it, but what it might be pushing us towards is much more mechanistic admissions processes, as opposed to more evaluative stuff — Moneyball as opposed to the experience of people who know baseball instinctually.”
But even a dramatic shift wouldn’t necessarily ease the angst surrounding admissions data. “I’m convinced that colleges, even if they enter into Columbia-like agreements, will continue to be accused of shenanigans in admissions, even if they’re not doing anything wrong,” he said. “I can see where this will be a never-ending cycle.”
Everyone wants to see the numbers. And they always will.
