Education advocates are afraid that the administration’s getting hold of admissions racial data could make colleges a more hostile place for students of color.

“The student data could be used to challenge the admission of Black students in particular under assumptions that they are presumptively unqualified because of their race,” Janel George, a law professor at Georgetown University, told HuffPost.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-colleges-race-data_n_68962810e4b0d3fa9ca0baa2

The administration is taking aim at an aspect of educational life that has long been a bugbear for conservatives.

By Nathalie Baptiste

Aug 8, 2025, 01:48 PM EDT

|Updated Aug 13, 2025

“Woke is officially DEAD at Brown. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Donald Trump declared in a Truth Social post last week.

He was celebrating the fact that the prestigious Providence, Rhode Island, university had just agreed to a settlement with him. In order to restore its federal funding, the school agreed to implement anti-transgender policies and hand over its race and admissions data.

It was similar to a deal the federal government had struck with Columbia University in New York after Trump relentlessly attacked the school in the wake of on-campus pro-Palestinian protests.

And then on Thursday, Trump went further: He signed an executive order demanding that every college in the country hand over its admissions data, citing a 2023 Supreme Court decision prohibiting the use of race as a factor in college admissions. “Greater transparency is essential to exposing unlawful practices and ultimately ridding society of shameful, dangerous racial hierarchies,” the order reads.

Already, there is growing fear from legal experts and higher education advocates that he could weaponize this data in order to get higher education institutions to fall in line with his administration’s goals.

“They can misuse the data, they can interpret it in any way they want,” said Mariam Rashid, the associate director for the Center for American Progress’ racial equity and justice program. “And they can misuse it in order to misinform the public, too.”

For example, the Trump administration could use the racial data to claim a university is discriminating against a certain race, or infer that not enough Trump supporters are being admitted because the freshman class doesn’t have a high enough percentage of students from red states.

Trump’s latest strike on American institutions connects his war on diversity and his administration’s assault on colleges across the country in a way that could turbocharge both. It’s not just that Trump will have an extraordinary amount of information about colleges; it’s how he’s likely to use it to further his false narrative about both race and higher education. And it’s students who will bear the brunt of the consequences.

“Given the administration’s flawed interpretation of our civil rights law, they might use this data to accuse schools of discrimination and threaten universities,” Donya Khadem, an attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told HuffPost.

“It’s unprecedented scrutiny by the federal government.”

– Donya Khadem, attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund

Trump has been strong-arming colleges to bend to his will since he returned to power in January, as part of his ongoing war on higher education and American thought. Threatening a loss of federal funding, the president started telling colleges that they needed to let his government oversee faculty hiring, department programs and the admissions process. The agenda is clear: the administration has openly told schools they must promote right-wing faculty and enroll students with “American values.”

Some schools refused to play the game. In April, Harvard University wrote a letter to Trump saying that his demands flew in the face of free speech laws and would stifle the kind of learning and research that happens at a place of higher education. But other schools, like Columbia and Brown, bent the knee and gave Trump what he wanted.

“It’s very concerning because it’s unprecedented scrutiny by the federal government,” Khadem said.

This time, the administration is taking aim at an aspect of educational life that has long been a bugbear for conservatives. There is a widespread belief among conservatives that colleges and universities have given advantages to students of color at the expense of white students.

By allowing race to be a factor in admissions, the claim goes, schools are taking spots away from certain groups of students and instead admitting students they claim are less qualified, based solely on their race. (In reality, race has been one of many factors admissions officers consider when choosing between fully qualified applicants.)

“This is all motivated by a racist myth that Black people don’t deserve to be in these elite spaces,” Khadem said.

And now that Trump is back in office, getting his hands on this data is likely just the beginning of his attempt to turn back the clock on admitting students of color.

Asked for comment about how it intends to use the admissions data, the Department of Education directed HuffPost to a press release about the new executive order Trump signed on Thursday.

“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,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said.

Photo by Sam Hammat/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Conservatives celebrated when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-conscious college admissions processes in Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard in 2023, saying that schools can not use race as a factor in college admissions.

Harvard, together with fellow defendant the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, had argued that schools needed to be able to consider race as one factor among many to ensure the educational benefits of a diverse student body. The high court disagreed, saying the schools did not have a “compelling interest” in considering race as a factor and thus violated the 14th Amendment.

But education law experts say that the federal government is using that ruling and expanding it far beyond its original intent.

In the same ruling, the court expressly said that “nothing prohibits 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.”

Now, Trump’s order undermines that.

“They’re using the Students For Fair Admissions [decision] in ways that are not what the justices meant when they wrote it,” Khadem said.

Education advocates are afraid that the administration’s getting hold of admissions racial data could make colleges a more hostile place for students of color.

“The student data could be used to challenge the admission of Black students in particular under assumptions that they are presumptively unqualified because of their race,” Janel George, a law professor at Georgetown University, told HuffPost.

“This is all motivated by a racist myth that Black people don’t deserve to be in these elite spaces.”

– Khadem

It could also turn off otherwise qualified students from attending some of these colleges. “I think it’s a big deterrent,” Khadem said. “Columbia’s campus has become and will continue to become less welcoming to Black students.”

Columbia and Brown did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

Systemic racism and inequality are already significant barriers to college attendance. Research shows that Black students and other people of color are more likely to be from low-income families and struggle to afford college. Then there’s the fact that standardized tests frequently used in college admissions are biased toward white students and those from wealthier families.

Studies have shown that race-neutral admissions processes lead to a drop in diversity. In 1996, after California voters approved a measure that would ban affirmative action at the state’s public universities, the state’s most prestigious schools saw a drastic drop in diversity. Indeed, one of the arguments made by Harvard during its legal fight was that no race-neutral admissions process offers the same diversity benefits.

The first college classes to be enrolled after the Students for Fair Admissions ruling varied in their diversity. Some schools, like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, saw a decrease in Black and Hispanic enrollment, while other schools’ racial compositions stayed roughly the same.

Not only could these changes further hinder access to higher education for nonwhite students, but there’s a question of how making this data public could harm students. If the Trump administration publicly calls out a school for having a certain number of nonwhite students, that could become a problem for people on campus.

“I do think it’s harmful,” Rashid said. “[The data] is not going to be attached to a name, but they can make up whatever narrative they want.”

Experts warn that it could create a hostile environment on campuses, where nonwhite students feel as if their peers believe that they’re unqualified to be there. “At schools with higher admissions of Black students or faculty, some people are going to feel a certain way about how they’re perceived at school,” Khadem said.

There is a direct line from Trump’s attacks on colleges to his administration’s larger anti-diversity campaign.

In an attempt to begin removing people of color from public life, Trump signed an executive order in January that sought to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs at different institutions, including nonprofit organizations receiving federal grants, law enforcement agencies and institutions of higher education. The penalty for not ending DEI, though vague, was the loss of crucial federal funding.

The Department of Education followed up with guidance for educational institutions, telling them they must end “racial preferences” and restore “merit.”

The Department of Justice joined the crusade too, launching investigations of colleges and universities it alleged were not complying with the Supreme Court’s ruling on using race in college admissions under the pretense of combating “illegal discrimination.”

“The [DOJ] will put an end to a shameful system in which someone’s race matters more than their ability,” acting Associate Attorney General Chad Mizelle said in a press release in March.

To the Trump administration, American society, and colleges in particular, have been beset by a racial regime that disfavors white conservatives — and this executive order was intended to combat that. Others, though, see a very different agenda.

“What they want to do is make everything race-neutral,” Rashid said. “In other words, make everything white.”