In a memorandum to Secretary of Education Linda McMahon last Thursday, President Donald Trump announced that for the first time, universities receiving federal financial assistance will be required to report data on applicants, admits, and enrollees by race to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
The memorandum, entitled “Ensuring Transparency in Higher Education Admissions,” is the Trump administration’s latest and most comprehensive effort to enforce Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, a 2023 Supreme Court decision that banned the use of racial preferences in university admissions. These data are expected to include students’ GPAs and standardized test scores, which will be pivotal to assess compliance with the ruling. Going forward, both the government and American families will be able to point to these data to show evidence of potential discrimination.
“It should not take years of legal proceedings, and millions of dollars in litigation fees, to elicit data from tax-payer funded institutions that identifies whether they are discriminating against hardworking American applicants,” said McMahon in a press release. “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.”
Over the last two years, universities have gone above and beyond to evade the Court’s ruling. They’ve added racially coded essay prompts to their applications, eliminated standardized testing requirements, and incorporated racial proxies, such as whether a student comes from a single-parent household, as considerations in the admissions process.
Some institutions have been strikingly bold in their defiance. Take, for example, Johns Hopkins University, which in the 2023-2024 admissions cycle asked applicants to “tell us about an aspect of your identity (e.g. race, gender, sexuality, religion, community, etc.) or a life experience that has shaped you as an individual and how that influenced what you’d like to pursue in college at Hopkins.”
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Author: Ruth King
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