Since taking office, President Donald Trump has attacked colleges and universities using such a bewildering range of tools—civil-rights investigations, research-funding recissions, student-loan cuts, visa bans—that it’s hard to keep track of what the White House is trying to reform or destroy. But the new higher-education compact offered to universities by the administration strongly suggests that Trump’s higher-education agenda, if successful, will result in a far less diverse academy, with fewer Black and Latino students. It will do this by demanding that colleges adopt an admissions system based purely on test scores and GPA—and accusing any institution that resists of illegal racial preferences.
Trump’s fixation on the racial makeup of selective colleges was evident during his first term, when the Justice Department sued Yale for racial bias. To back its claim, the DOJ included a table comparing Yale’s admissions rate for students of different races and ethnicities with an “Academic Index,” a measure that combines high-school grades and SAT or ACT scores. The admissions rates weren’t identical: 35 percent of Hispanic students in the top decile of the Academic Index were admitted, for example, compared with 20 percent of white students. The government argued that this showed “significant discrimination on the ground of race.”
The Biden administration withdrew the lawsuit, which seemingly became moot in 2023, when the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. But after that ruling, the racial makeup of elite universities didn’t shift as much as the winning litigants might have hoped. Although the percentage of Black students enrolling at Harvard fell after the decision, just as the university had warned, it stayed the same at Yale. Meanwhile, the percentage of Asian students enrolling at Yale declined—even though the stated aim of the SFFA lawsuit was to eliminate anti-Asian discrimination.
Trump’s second administration seems to be treating SFFA not as the end of the affirmative-action wars but more as the beginning, even as it has sought to eliminate “DEI” from government, business, and higher education. In February, the Department of Education sent a letter to every college and university denouncing “pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences” and claiming that SFFA prohibits universities from considering race in any way, including “admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies, and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life.” It was forced to withdraw the letter in April after a federal judge noted that the SFFA ruling applied only to admissions.
The administration tried to impose its expansive view of the law again in July, when it cut a deal with Columbia to restore hundreds of millions of dollars in grants that were being withheld ostensibly on the grounds that the university had violated the rights of Jewish students. Under the agreement, Columbia “may not, by any means, unlawfully preference applicants based on race, color, or national origin in admissions throughout its programs. No proxy for racial admission will be implemented or maintained.” Brown University struck a deal a week later. Its agreement had identical language, minus the word unlawfully. The universities also agreed to provide the government with admissions data “broken down by race, color, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests,” and to maintain “merit-based admissions.” The deals being negotiated with other elite schools, including Harvard and UCLA, likely include the same terms.
“Merit-based admissions” is not a defined legal concept. Traditionally, colleges consider a wide range of criteria when evaluating an applicant: not only raw academic numbers, but also extracurricular factors such as artistic or athletic ability, and the potential to attract parental donations. But the administration’s focus on GPA and standardized-test scores suggests that it plans to use the new stream of admissions data to re-create the chart it used in the Yale lawsuit, showing different admissions rates by race and ethnicity. It could then portray the chart as definitive evidence that Columbia and Brown have broken their promise to implement merit-based admissions, and once again withhold federal funding. In this scenario, the universities might be able to get their money only by radically reducing the number of Black and Latino students who enroll.
This would be a victory for the MAGA agenda, but only at two institutions. The White House, however, is also moving to get the data it wants for all selective universities. In August, Trump directed Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to “expand the scope of required reporting to provide adequate transparency into admissions.” A week later, the Department of Education published a notice in the Federal Register, normally a repository for some of the most mind-numbing bureaucratic prose imaginable. This one had more spice:
Despite the ruling in SFFA, the continued widespread emphasis on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) in higher education causes concerns that unlawful practices may persist because DEI has been used as a pretext to advance overt and insidious racial discrimination. The federal government does not currently collect racial data on admissions and scholarships and has limited tools to ensure widescale compliance with Title VI. Greater transparency through the collection of this type of information will help to expose unlawful practices, enable the Department to better enforece [sic] Title VI, and create good incentives for voluntary compliance.
The regulation would direct the department to:
Collect data by race-sex pair on: (1) the count of institutions’ applied, admitted, and enrolled cohorts, both overall and further disaggregated by admission test score quintiles, GPA quintiles, ranges of family income, Pell Grant eligibility, and parental education; (2) the average high school grade point average and admission test score quintiles for institutions’ applied, admitted, and enrolled cohorts; (3) the count of students admitted via early action, early decision, or regular admissions.
Once the notice of a new regulation is posted, it enters a “public comment” phase. The government is legally obligated to consider all comments. Hundreds of identical submissions have been filed about the new admissions rule. “As a concerned citizen, I am worried about the appearance of continued racial discrimination in college admissions,” they say, before citing research from Defending Education, a Virginia-based advocacy organization whose trustees include Edward Blum, the founder of Students for Fair Admissions.
In theory, the new data being sought by the Education Department would allow the administration to re-create the Yale chart hundreds of times over. But the administration faces another obstacle: Over the past decade, and particularly since the pandemic, many selective universities have gone test-optional, meaning applicants don’t have to submit SAT or ACT scores. Columbia, Duke, Vanderbilt, and Amherst are among those that no longer require a standardized test. (Other elite schools have since brought back standardized-test requirements.) Proving that admissions aren’t “merit based” is hard if you lack reliable data about your preferred measure of “merit.”
This difficulty might help explain certain demands in the administration’s higher-ed compact, which offers hazy promises of preferred access to funding if the schools in question adopt Trump’s higher-education agenda wholesale, and less vague threats of financial ruin if they don’t. (Last week, MIT became the first institution to reject the deal.) Signatories, the compact explains, must not only promise not to use any “proxies” for race during admissions; among other requirements, they must “have all undergraduate applicants take a widely-used standardized test (i.e. SAT, ACT, or CLT) or program-specific measures of accomplishment in the case of music, art, and other specialized programs of study.”
In the Columbia and Brown settlements, the administration suggested that it will use the admissions data it gathers to conduct “appropriate statistical analyses.” This appears to be a euphemism for creating a new version of the Yale chart and declaring that any overrepresentation of minority students relative to their scores is evidence of illegal preferences. In fact, there is no statistically valid way to conclusively prove racial bias in an incredibly complex process like college admissions just by calculating average SAT scores. The SFFA case itself showed how difficult such determinations can be when done in good faith. Highly respected economists testified for both sides on the question of whether Harvard had discriminated against Asian students—and arrived at opposite conclusions. The divergence came down to subtle choices in which variables to include and how to model the highly complicated and, in certain respects, inherently unquantifiable admissions process. (Ultimately, the Supreme Court did not pick a side, focusing instead on the question of whether the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits colleges from considering race as an admissions factor to promote educational diversity.)
Elite universities have never had a “merit based” admissions process based solely on high-school grades and test scores. Nor should they. These institutions are spoiled for choice among applicants with perfect GPAs and 1600 SATs. They look for unusual talents and leadership potential, and these are not merely ways to achieve racial diversity by other means. In fact, Peter Arcidiacono, SFFA’s expert witness, found that at Harvard, getting an admissions bump for sports was statistically correlated with being white.
And yet the Department of Education seems unlikely to declare admissions preferences for athletes an illegal racial proxy. The Trump administration appears to have already made its conclusions about higher education, and is now seeking to backfill the data that will justify them. Trump’s precise vision for elite academia remains ill-defined, but it does not seem to make much room for nonwhite faces. It’s another step toward what The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer has called the “Great Resegregation.” The administration has been systematically removing Black people from senior government positions. Its college-admissions policy might ensure that the next generation of diverse leadership is stopped before it begins.
The post The Logical End Point of Trump’s Higher-Education Agenda appeared first on The Atlantic.
