President Trump on Thursday signed a memorandum requiring all colleges participating in federal-aid programs to share detailed admissions data with the federal government “to verify” that they are not unlawfully considering applicants’ race.
And with that, the hunt is on.
In the months ahead, the Trump administration apparently plans to seek out evidence that institutions are flouting the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, which banned the consideration of an applicant’s racial status. The big, perplexing question: What, exactly, might constitute such evidence?
The answer isn’t clear. But what’s certain is that with the stroke of a pen, President Trump just ushered in an era of intense and unprecedented scrutiny for the nation’s admissions offices.
The memorandum directs Linda McMahon, the education secretary, to “expand the scope of required reporting for institutions’ admissions data in order to provide adequate transparency.” Later on Thursday, the Education Department announced that Secretary McMahon had instructed the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to collect data from colleges disaggregated by race and gender for all applicants, admitted students, and those who enroll. That data will include “quantitative measures of applicants’ and admitted students’ academic achievements,” including their standardized-test scores, grade-point averages, and “other applicant characteristics.”
Secretary McMahon had also directed the NCES to develop a “rigorous audit process to ensure the data being collected is accurate and reported consistently across institutions,” the announcement said. Requiring colleges to submit more detailed data, Secretary McMahon said in a written statement, would “provide full transparency into their admissions practices.”
A fact sheet posted on the White House’s website says the government would revamp the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, known as IPEDS, as well as the online presentation of each institution’s data “to make it efficient, easily accessible, and intelligibly presented for parents and students.”
Edward Blum, president of Students for Fair Admissions and the architect of the lawsuits that effectively ended race-conscious admissions, hailed Thursday’s news as “a landmark step toward the transparency and accountability” that would benefit the public. “This is a critical victory for the principle of equal treatment under the law,” he said in a written statement. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and when colleges are required to disclose how they weigh different factors in admissions, the American people will finally be able to assess whether those practices are fair, legal, and constitutional.”
Thursday’s announcements came in the wake of the Trump administration’s controversial agreement with Columbia University requiring the Ivy League institution to hand over data — “broken down by race, color, grade-point average, and performance on standardized tests” — for all rejected and admitted applicants. Brown University has since agreed to do the same in its own agreement with the Trump administration.
Now, most of the nation’s colleges have been told to follow suit. IPEDS, a hub of publicly accessible information about colleges, includes statistics on enrollments and financial aid. Consumers can use IPEDS to see the total number of applicants at a given college, as well as the percentages of those who were admitted and enrolled; each of those categories is broken down by gender, but only enrolled students are now disaggregated by race.
There is no way to avoid recruiting in diverse communities because we are a diverse nation. Are we to say to colleges now that they just can’t recruit?
It’s worth noting that, as The Chronicle recently reported, the NCES was already planning to start collecting disaggregated data on the race and ethnicity of each college’s applicants and the students it admits — and not just for those who end up enrolling. Some education-policy wonks and college-access groups have been pushing for that change, arguing that it would enable better research on equity in admissions outcomes. In other words, colleges were already preparing to submit later this year some of the data the Trump administration is now demanding.
Those demands, however, are based on a prevalent suspicion among conservative Republicans that some colleges are violating the ban on race-conscious admissions. “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,” the White House fact sheet says. The information colleges now must submit to the government will “provide the public with a more holistic view of the factors these institutions consider in admissions.”
But what will these vast troves of data actually reveal?
Angel B. Pérez, chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, told The Chronicle on Thursday that colleges are being set up to fail. After all, merely looking at two applicants’ race, test scores, and grades can’t reveal why one was admitted and the other was denied.
“These data points won’t tell the full story of a student’s academic promise, of what students are actually bringing to the table,” he said. “That story is much more complicated than just their grades and test scores. And so you’re not going to be able to gather the full picture of information from the kind of data that the government is asking for, particularly around race.”
Pérez expressed concern about how President Trump’s memorandum seemed to echo recent legal guidance from the Justice Department, which described race-conscious scholarships, internships, and mentoring programs as likely illegal. The department also warned against the unlawful use of proxies for race, such as the consideration of an applicant’s “lived experience” or “overcoming obstacles.” And the guidance also mentioned “recruitment strategies targeting specific geographic areas, institutions, or organizations chosen primarily because of their racial or ethnic composition rather than other legitimate factors.”
“I really do believe that the administration is not going to be satisfied unless institutions are majority white,” Pérez said. “Colleges recruit all over the place, and, with the demographic shifts we’re seeing, many institutions are putting a lot of their recruitment engine into Texas, California, and the South, because that is where the high-school age population is booming, as opposed to the Northeast and the Midwest. There is no way to avoid recruiting in diverse communities because we are a diverse nation. Are we to say to colleges now that they just can’t recruit?”
At a time when several highly selective colleges find themselves in a brighter spotlight than ever before, it’s easy to forget that the vast majority of four-year institutions never considered applicants’ race and ethnicity to begin with. Now, all colleges must brace for more scrutiny from an administration hunting for evidence of wrongdoing by their admissions offices.
Thursday’s announcement comes just 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,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in the statement, is “just the beginning” of a push to “eliminate DEI” in admissions.
Wil Del Pilar, senior vice president at the Education Trust, a nonprofit that advocates for racial and economic equality in education, said Trump’s memorandum was less about transparency than about limiting colleges access: “I think the endgame is to scrutinize admissions and to effectively put institutions on notice that if they have advances in diversity in their college admissions process — if a Black student gets in, if a Latino students gets in — that will be viewed and labeled as illegal discrimination.”
Del Pilar, who previously worked in admissions offices, worries that the Trump administration will draw misleading conclusions from examinations of admissions data. He recalled that during the long legal battles leading up to the Supreme Court’s decision on race-conscious admissions, the respective researchers for the plaintiffs and defendants reached opposite conclusions after analyzing admissions data for evidence of racial bias.
“It really doesn’t matter what’s in the data,” Del Pilar said. “They’re going to find something. They’re going to find the bogeyman in the data.”
