Trump Is Demanding Colleges To Submit Data On Students’ Race

Colleges and universities have often found themselves in the crosshairs of the Trump administration and the president himself. Decried as hotbeds of liberalism and left-wing radicals, institutions like Harvard, Columbia, and others have been threatened with legal action and withholding of federal grants and funds.

Now, Trump has claimed, without hard evidence, that colleges continue to consider and admit students based exclusively on race despite a 2023 Supreme Court ruling to stop such practices. He has issued a statement to demand further transparency in order to “ultimately [rid] society of shameful, dangerous racial hierarchies.”

“American students and taxpayers deserve confidence in the fairness and integrity of our Nation’s institutions of higher education, including confidence that they are recruiting and training capable future doctors, engineers, scientists, and other critical workers vital to the next generations of American prosperity,” Trump wrote in an August 7 statement. “Race-based admissions practices are not only unfair, but also threaten our national security and well-being. It is therefore the policy of my Administration to ensure institutions of higher education receiving Federal financial assistance are transparent in their admissions practices.”

In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that colleges and universities could not consider race as a factor in the admissions process, effectively striking down affirmative action in higher education via Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard.

The move was praised by Donald Trump, who declared “This is a great day for America. People with extraordinary ability and everything else necessary for success, including future greatness for our country, are finally being rewarded. This is the ruling everyone was waiting and hoping for.”

Apparently, however, the president does not believe this ruling is sufficient. He claims that personal essays are being used as proxies to consider race in admission. Crucially, in the SFFA v Harvard majority opinion, Chief Justice Roberts stated that the ruling explicitly did not prohibit universities “from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university.”

In a statement from Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) will collect data from institutes of higher learning disaggregated by race and sex relating to their applicant pool, admitted cohort, and enrolled cohort at the undergraduate level and for specific graduate and professional programs.

Critics of this plan point out that the president and the Education Department do not seem concerned with making sure college admissions are fair based on students’ socioeconomic status, for example, or whether students’ parents attended the university.

There is no word on how exactly this data will be evaluated. Will ED become a second admissions office for every college and university in the country? But “remedial action” has already been threatened for institutions that fail to submit complete, accurate data in a timely manner. , if institutions fail to submit data in a timely manner or are found to have submitted incomplete or inaccurate data.