Anti-Discrimination Advocates’ New Weapon

The 2023 Supreme Court decision Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard was an earthquake for college admissions. After nearly 50 years, the affirmative-action regime that governed most universities’ admissions processes was declared unconstitutional.

Racial preferences in college admissions have never been popular among Americans. A 2023 Pew Research Center poll taken a few months before the Students for Fair Admissions decision was released found that only 33 percent of adults approved of affirmative action in college admissions. In California, affirmative action in education has lost at the ballot box twice, most recently in 2020. Even when the cultural and political milieu is predisposed to increase support for the policy, most Americans still don’t like affirmative action in college admissions.

No selective university has chosen to subject its admissions process to scrutiny. Yet, the opposite is true among university administrators. Harvard and the University of North Carolina fought vigorously in the courts for years to keep their discriminatory admissions policies in place. In the 21st century, public universities in Texas and Michigan also took the fight for race-conscious admissions to the Supreme Court. Among university administrators (who lean heavily to the political left), it is a given that a diverse student body is beneficial and that admissions personnel should take deliberate steps to admit as many “underrepresented” students as possible.

Disaggregation of admissions statistics will permit analyses that show whether students from any demographic group have an advantage. This is why the reaction to Students for Fair Admissions from many universities was negative. The presidents of Brown University, Stanford University, and Northwestern University all issued official statements that they were “deeply disappointed” by the Supreme Court’s decision. They and many other university presidents affirmed their commitment to diversity while still stating that they would follow the law. (For people who claim to be free thinkers, these presidents used eerily similar language in many of these statements.)

The mismatch between public opinion about affirmative action in admissions and university practices always meant that the admissions process was often a highly secretive “black box,” even at public universities. Even after the Students for Fair Admissions decision, no selective university has chosen to subject its admissions process to scrutiny.

Opening the Black Box

That is about to change. On August 7, 2025, the Department of Education issued a new directive stating that universities must report data on their applicants, admitted students, and enrolled students. The data on these groups must be disaggregated by race and sex. That disaggregation will permit statistical analyses that will easily determine whether students from any demographic group have an advantage over other students who have the same academic qualifications. The data must be reported to the government’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data Systems (IPEDS) database, which already collects some data from universities.

The new directive makes enforcing the Students for Fair Admissions decision much easier. Previously, disaggregated data about applicants and admitted students could be obtained only during a lawsuit. (Even open-records requests often do not produce this information.) Now, the Department of Education has made reporting these statistics a condition for receiving access to federal research funds or student loans. By making the data transparent, the Trump administration makes it easy for the government to identify universities that have admissions practices that result in de facto discrimination. And all of the necessary data will be delivered each year to the government and the public, without requiring any lawsuits, investigations, or open-records requests. You might as well tie a bow on it.

How did universities react to this development? They … didn’t. University officials have not expressed “disappointment” in the directive or protested the new requirements, even though the directive explicitly says its goal is to make enforcing the Supreme Court’s ruling easier. Even the New York Times acknowledged that the government has “wide latitude” about what data to collect for IPEDS, and almost no one is questioning the legality of the new directive (although some outside experts have expressed skepticism about its feasibility).

If universities acknowledge they will comply with the Supreme Court ruling, and they do not protest reporting data to make it easy to catch violations of the law, it is legitimate to ask whether increased enforcement is necessary. The answer is yes. Even after Students for Fair Admissions made discrimination illegal in college admissions, leaked data from a hacker showed that Columbia University and NYU are both still discriminating in their admissions. Other universities have seen suspiciously little change in their student demographics since the Supreme Court ruling.

Almost no one is questioning the legality of the Trump administration’s new directive. For example, Princeton University’s Class of 2027 and Class of 2028 have almost the exact same percentages of Hispanic and black students. The same pattern occurred in Yale University’s Classes of 2027 and 2028. At both universities, the percentage of Asian students decreased in the latter cohort, even though all observers expected that the end of affirmative action would result in an increase in admitted Asian students. Both universities signed an amicus brief in the Students for Fair Admissions case stating that eliminating affirmative action would make it impossible to have a diverse student body. Either Princeton and Yale were lying to the Supreme Court, or both are still discriminating against Asian applicants.

When universities are forced to report disaggregated data, it will be much harder to use holistic review to lessen the impact of objective admissions standards. Many universities continue to discriminate under the guise of “holistic review,” which is a time-tested strategy to smuggle subjectivity into the admissions process. But when universities are forced to report disaggregated data on their applicants and students, it will be much harder to use holistic review to lessen the impact of objective admissions standards. The public nature of IPEDS makes discrimination especially risky for universities, because anyone will be able to compare the academic qualifications of applicants and admitted students from different groups. Data sleuths who find a large discrepancy can file a civil-rights complaint with the Department of Education and trigger an investigation.

Students for Fair Admissions was an important victory against institutional racism in America. But history teaches that the fight is not over yet. After Brown v. Board of Education banned segregation in 1954, local officials in the South tried to ignore or undermine the Supreme Court’s ruling. It took nearly 20 years of lawsuits, state action, and even the use of the military to stamp out segregation. The IPEDS changes are an important component of enforcing the Supreme Court’s decision, because they will make lawbreaking harder to hide. Universities that continue to discriminate will soon be easy targets for the Trump administration’s eager enforcement staff. It will take time, but this modern-day discrimination practice will eventually die out.

Russell T. Warne is a former associate professor of psychology in the Department of Behavioral Science at Utah Valley University.