As part of President Donald Trump’s effort to eliminate preferential treatment in college admissions, institutions must now prove they no longer consider an applicant’s race.
The Trump Administration on Thursday announced a new process for the National Center for Education Statistics to collect data from higher education institutions on their admissions practices.
According to a memorandum from the President, colleges and universities will be required to report data disaggregated by race and sex relating to their applicant pool, admitted cohort and enrolled cohort at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Data will prioritize quantitative measures of applicants’ and admitted students’ academic achievements such as standardized test scores, GPAs and other applicant characteristics.
“Race-based admissions practices are not only unfair, but also threaten our national security and well-being,” reads President Donald Trump’s memorandum. “It is therefore the policy of my Administration to ensure institutions of higher education receiving Federal financial assistance are transparent in their admissions practices.”
Furthermore, U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon delegated the NCES to develop a rigorous audit process ensuring that the data collected is accurately reported across institutions.
“Following the revelations of rampant racial preferencing in college admissions exposed by SFFA v. Harvard, the Trump Administration is now standardizing reporting from colleges and universities to provide full transparency into their admissions practices,” said McMahon. “It should not take years of legal proceedings, and millions of dollars in litigation fees, to elicit data from taxpayer-funded institutions that identifies whether they are discriminating against hard-working American applicants.”
The decision comes in light of the 2023 Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which found that racial preferencing in college and university admissions is illegal under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
In the case of Harvard, it was determined that the university was practicing “extreme” racial preferencing, according to the Education Department.
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