President Donald Trump is expected to sign a directive on Thursday mandating that universities provide admissions data to prove that they are not implementing affirmative action policies, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on X.
Leavitt did not disclose the criteria that the administration will use to determine whether schools are practicing race-conscious admissions.
It comes after Ivy League universities Columbia and Brown last month reached settlements that require them to release information about applicants’ race in addition to test scores and academic performance after they went back and forth with the Trump administration for months over federal funding. The settlements have stoked debates about academic freedom and the role of government institutions in higher education.
The president's directive comes more than two years after the Supreme Court struck down the use of affirmative action programs at the University of North Carolina and Harvard, ruling that the consideration of race in the admissions process violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. Conservative activists, who argued that the policy led to discrimination against white and Asian students, considered the rulings a major victory.
The rulings, however, were heavily criticized by those who argued that race-conscious admissions provided an avenue for students from marginalized communities to combat historical racial discrimination in the higher education system.
“But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a dissenting opinion in the UNC case (Jackson recused herself from the Harvard case; she was on Harvard’s board of overseers until last year). “And having so detached itself from this country’s actual past and present experiences, the Court has now been lured into interfering with the crucial work that UNC and other institutions of higher learning are doing to solve America’s real-world problems.”
The Trump administration has aggressively cracked down on diversity, equity and inclusion-related programs, with the president signing an executive order in his first week directing all departments and agencies to terminate “discriminatory and illegal preferences, mandates, policies, programs” and more.
