August 11, 2025
Trump’s new executive order demands colleges turn over race-related admissions data to the government.
On Aug. 7, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to further dictate how universities conduct their admissions processes. Although the Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that universities could not use affirmative action to admit students, the court left room for race to be considered via admission essays if the applicant’s race shaped their lives in significant ways. Trump’s new executive order requires colleges to turn over race-related admissions data to the government.
According to The Associated Press, Trump’s executive order takes aim at that loophole, arguing that allowing essays to consider race is just another way of implementing affirmative action, which conservatives consider an unfair disadvantage to white people, particularly white men.
“The persistent lack of available data — 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,” Trump’s memorandum stated.
The Trump administration has been engaged in proxy battles with higher education since his inauguration in January. Conservatives have long held that higher education and elite universities are hostile to their particular worldview. In addition, the Trump administration has consistently used the idea that universities like Harvard, Brown, and Columbia have allowed antisemitism to flourish on their campuses to cut funding and manipulate those universities into allowing unprecedented federal control.
The latter pair of universities agreed to pay hundreds of millions in fines to the federal government. In exchange for access to the substantial research funds it had previously frozen, the universities agreed to furnish the government with data on the race and ethnicity, grade point averages, and standardized test scores of applicants, admitted students and enrolled students at those institutions.
As Kristen Shahverdian, program director for campus free speech at PEN America, told Vox, these settlements are likely just the beginning.
“This does set up a bit of a road map, unfortunately, that I think is probably going to ripple across higher education. This most likely has emboldened the Trump administration,” Shahverdian said.
Likewise, Connor Murnane, the campus advocacy chief of staff at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), told the outlet that these settlements set a chilling precedent.
“In the end, Columbia’s capitulation and Harvard’s behind-the-scenes negotiation send a troubling message to colleges and universities nationwide: yield to political pressure, and the pressure may momentarily subside. But behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated. This is not civil rights enforcement, it is political coercion under the color of law,” Murnane stated.
According to NPR, shortly after Trump issued his presidential memorandum, Trump’s Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, who is committed to dismantling the department she oversees, directed the National Center for Education Statistics to collect more data about students.
“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 argued in a statement. “The Trump Administration will ensure that meritocracy and excellence once again characterize American higher education.”
Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education (ACE), and a former undersecretary of education in the Obama administration, indicated that he doesn’t believe that the Department of Education will be able to process all of that data in a timely manner.
“This is a fishing expedition,” the department, he said, is casting “a really big net,” and given the massive cuts to the workforce, the department won’t be able to adequately dig into the mass of data that will be dumped onto its desks.
He continued, “This is why we have recommendation letters. This is why we care if someone’s been on an athletic team [or] if they’re a cellist. Because we want to get a better picture of what those numbers mean; all [the Supreme Court] said was, you can’t use race as a determining factor, even though they also said diversity is really important.”
Although the majority of the focus has been on large, elite, coastal universities, another critical group of universities, community colleges, is also feeling the strain from the crackdown on higher education.
Durham Tech, located in the same city as Duke University, is a majority-minority campus, like other community colleges across the country. It is much more reflective of the community it’s situated in than the larger university that produced NBA stars Grant Hill, Kyrie Irving, and Jason Tatum.
As George Boggs, the emeritus president of the American Association of Community Colleges and a founding member of Education for All, told New York Times Magazine, “They’re (the Trump administration) after the Ivy League institutions, but we’re affected by the same legislation, the same executive orders. Except it can be worse for us, because our students are more diverse, and they need different kinds of support.”
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