The text might sound like a bit of wonkery, but President Trump’s August 7 memorandum, “Ensuring Transparency in Higher Education Admissions,” is a powerful tool in the fight against the racial discrimination in higher education that was supposedly ended (but most likely keeps going in most institutions) by the Supreme Court in 2023’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA)decision.
That ruling was greeted by many institutions with groans and less-than-convincing agreements to change their ways. Yet every time somebody pulls back the curtain on any sector of higher education, it becomes apparent that little, if anything, has changed.
In June, a hacker who had previously gained access to and leaked information from New York University’s admissions database also gained access to and leaked from Columbia University. The Substack writer “Cremieux” examined the leaked data from both institutions in a post titled “Columbia is Still Discriminating.”
While Columbia’s information was a bit more opaque than NYU’s due to their failure to require test scores from applicants, Cremieux was able to use the data available to get a clearer picture because of the other kinds of information present. And the conclusion was clearly what is communicated in his title:
“With more common criteria, the picture becomes much more like NYU’s, with Columbia clearly rejecting more qualified Whites and Asians than the Hispanics and Blacks they choose to admit. That means White and Asian students tend to have better GPAs, more extracurriculars, and—quite likely—better personalities and higher levels of other achievements, as we saw in the SFFA v. Harvard case. Virtually every qualification favors White and Asian students, and yet they’re still admitted less, at a level not explicable by things like legacy status, athletics and faculty relationships, and so on.”
The day before the Trump memorandum was released, Ian Kingsbury also reported at City Journal on a new study showing widespread racial discrimination at American medical schools. Kingsbury submitted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to all 93 medical schools in the United States. While only 23 responded, the information they provided showed evidence of rampant discrimination: “Accepted black applicants had lower average MCAT scores than accepted white or Asian students at all but one school, Carle Illinois College of Medicine. Thirteen schools accepted black students with average MCAT scores lower than the score of the average rejected Asian or white applicant. That suggests black applicants receive significant preferential treatment.”
At two schools, Eastern Virginia Medical School and the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, Kingsbury found that black applicants were 10 times more likely to gain admission as white or Asian students with the same test scores and grades.
Kingsbury argues that the 23 schools are very likely representative of the others in discriminating based on race. He pulled data from 34 medical schools with “publicly released demographic data that broadly show little change in the racial composition of their student bodies since the Court’s ruling. At nine, the shares of ‘under-represented’ students have actually increased.”
What to do? In the June article, Cremieux advocated as a solution to the problem the use of the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), which is kept by our National Center for Education Statistics. He noted that though IPEDS keeps statistics on the number of students applying, admitted, and enrolled, it does not include either the race or the test scores any of these categories. If universities were forced to report even this data, we could see “unambiguously” if they are still discriminating. If IPEDS is required to report even more robust data, we could get a complete picture.
That is precisely the direction President Trump has taken. His August 7 memorandum directs the Secretary of Education to “revise and, if necessary, overhaul the IPEDS data collection portal to remove inefficiencies and better streamline the process to more efficiently organize and utilize the data received from the institutions.” Further, the Secretary shall, within 120 days, “expand the scope of required reporting to provide adequate transparency into admissions, as determined by the Secretary of Education, consistent with applicable law.” This information is then to be made “easily accessible and intelligibly presented for parents and students.”
It did not take 120 days for Education Secretary Linda McMahon to get going. The same day, August 7, she released her own letter responding to the memorandum. In it, she mandated that NCES “will collect data disaggregated by race and sex relating to the applicant pool, admitted cohort, and enrolled cohort at the undergraduate level, and for specific graduate and professional programs.”
She added that colleges and universities “will also be required to report quantitative measures of applicants and admitted students’ academic achievement such as standardized test scores, GPAs, first-generation-college student status, and other applicant characteristics, for each race-and-sex pair.” For each enrolled cohort, NCES would require “data for each race-and-sex pair’s graduation rates, final GPAs, financial aid offered, financial aid provided, and other relevant measures.”
In other words, every institution will have to pull back the curtain and show whether they are still discriminating on the basis of race and sex.
There may be some challenges. USA Today noted that NCES’s staff has been whittled down by cuts to the Department of Education. But it is not unreasonable to assume that many who were let go might have attempted to block the changes, so it might be yet another case of addition by subtraction.
What is clear is that by demanding information about what colleges and universities are doing in admissions and financial aid—and then making them public—the Trump administration is setting such institutions up for accountability.
Higher education has been the origin of much of the infection of the new progressive discrimination in America. It may be a cliché that sunlight is the best disinfectant, but there’s truth to the saying. When we can see which institutions are still illegally discriminating, the incentives of lawsuits, threats of loss of federal funds, and loss of donors will be a powerful medicine.
David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.
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