On August 7, President Trump issued a Presidential Memorandum calling for the U.S. Department of Education to 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. The order also stipulated that institutions will 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.
According to the Department of Education, “these new requirements will enable the American public to assess whether schools are passing over the most qualified students in favor of others based on their race.”
“Going forward, universities will be required to provide this data directly to us through an existing data system,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. “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. The Trump administration will ensure that meritocracy and excellence once again characterize American higher education.”
Angel Pérez, the CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, told Politico that “this is probably yet another thing that is going to end up in the courts. What it does do, though, is it continues to create chaos. It continues to create a culture of fear on campuses, and it continues to weaponize the practices that college admission officers use to enroll their first-year classes.”
Wil Del Pilar, senior vice president of EdTrust in Washington, D.C., stated that “the availability of admissions data should be used to break down systemic barriers, not to build new ones. Instead, this directive risks the futures of our students, using the language of fairness to justify policies that make our higher education system less fair, less just, and less representative of the America we aspire to be.”
Critics of the plan also noted that vast cuts to the budget of the U.S. Department of Education and the layoffs of hundreds of workers will make it extremely difficult for the department to assemble, analyze, and report the admissions data it seeks to collect.
This is all about creating chaos and making sure that white students receive preferential treatment. Trump probably received instructions for this from the creators of Project 2025. I doubt that the general public is concerned about the qualifications of admitted students to universities unless they feel that they were unjustly denied admission.
The struggle is going to be the same core issue as always: If we shift to meritocracy instead of race-based preferences, blacks will lose out. Average SAT or ACT scores of blacks are much lower than whites and asians–so much lower that black children from wealthy black families have lower scores than white children from poverty-stricken families (according to this Journal of Blacks in Higher Education). We have to find a way to retain race-based preferences because otherwise we will lose black representation in higher education. https://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html#:~:text=Whites%20from%20families%20with%20incomes,income%20was%20less%20than%20$10%2C000.