Trump Administration to Collect College Data on Affirmative Action Compliance

A federal judge in Boston halted the Trump administration's sweeping push to force colleges to prove they are no longer considering race in admissions, delivering a significant setback to one of the administration's most aggressive higher education enforcement efforts.

U.S. District Court Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV granted a preliminary injunction on Friday, blocking the Education Department from collecting race and sex admissions data through a new survey mandate known as the "Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement," an expansion of the existing Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. The injunction applies only to public universities in the states that brought the suit.

The ruling follows a lawsuit filed on March 11 by a coalition of 17 Democratic state attorneys general, including New York's Letitia James and counterparts in California and Massachusetts. While Saylor acknowledged that the federal government likely holds the legal authority to collect the data, he found the administration's rollout to be fatally flawed in its execution. "The 120-day deadline imposed by the President led directly to the failure of NCES (National Center for Education Statistics) to engage meaningfully with the institutions during the notice-and-comment process to address the multitude of problems presented by the new requirements," Saylor wrote.

The data collection effort traces back to an August memorandum from President Trump, who cited a lack of data to assess whether race remained an admissions factor after the Supreme Court's 2023 decision, expressing concern about what he called the "rampant use of 'diversity statements' and other overt and hidden racial proxies." Following the memo, Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced that institutions would need to report admissions data disaggregated by race and sex. The department sought seven years of that data.

The states argued that the Education Department rushed the new requirements into effect without complying with the law, placing an unmanageable burden on colleges and universities. Privacy was a central concern: the states contended the data collection risks invading student privacy and leading to baseless investigations of colleges and universities, and also argued that universities had not been given enough time to collect the data.

The Supreme Court's 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard banned race-based affirmative action in admissions but preserved the right of applicants to discuss how race has personally shaped their lives in application essays, a nuance the states say makes broad data collection especially prone to overreach.

The Trump administration separately sued Harvard University over similar data, saying it refused to provide admissions records the Justice Department demanded. Harvard said it had been responding to the government's requests and is in compliance with the ruling. The Education Department's Office for Civil Rights directed Harvard to comply with the data requests within 20 days or face referral to the Justice Department.

New York Attorney General Letitia James hailed Friday's ruling, saying in a statement that "schools should not have to scramble to produce years of sensitive information to satisfy an arbitrary and unlawful demand." The Education Department did not respond to requests for comment.

The ruling does not end the administration's enforcement ambitions; it freezes one instrument of them while litigation proceeds. With Harvard still under direct Justice Department scrutiny and the broader legal battle over the data mandate unresolved, the confrontation between the administration and the higher education sector over post-affirmative action compliance is far from settled.