In a move that’s shaking the foundations of American higher education, President Donald Trump has ordered every U.S. university—including the nation’s most prestigious, like Harvard—to submit detailed admissions data that will prove they’re not using race as a factor in their decisions. The directive, issued Thursday, August 7, 2025, is the latest salvo in a years-long battle over affirmative action, transparency, and the future of diversity in academia. According to The New York Post and The Harvard Crimson, the Trump administration’s new policy is set to overhaul the way colleges report and justify their admissions practices, putting them under a microscope like never before.
This sweeping order arrives on the heels of the 2023 Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which banned affirmative action in higher education nationwide. While the ruling was clear in its prohibition of race-based admissions, the Trump administration has interpreted it even more broadly, declaring that diversity and inclusion programs, “cultural competence” hiring requirements, and efforts to recruit minority students or job candidates are now illegal. The administration’s stance is that any consideration of race—whether overt or hidden—violates the Supreme Court’s mandate.
“Universities’ use of ‘diversity statements’ and ‘overt and hidden racial proxies’ indicates that race may still be considered in admissions,” President Trump wrote in his Thursday memorandum, as reported by The Harvard Crimson. The order tasks Education Secretary Linda McMahon with revamping the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), the federal database that tracks university statistics nationwide. The goal? To expand the scope of required reporting for the 2025-26 academic year, ensuring what the administration calls “adequate transparency into admissions.”
The specifics of the new requirements are striking. Schools will now have to report students’ grade point averages, standardized test scores, first-generation status, and other characteristics, all disaggregated by race and sex. According to McMahon’s directive, the National Center for Education Statistics—responsible for overseeing IPEDS—must collect this additional admissions data to “ensure race-based preferences are not used in university admissions processes.” While the memo doesn’t explicitly demand race data, the administration has been clear: this is about rooting out what it sees as illicit affirmative action.
For Harvard and its Ivy League peers, the stakes are high. Harvard’s own admissions statistics have come under intense scrutiny since the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision. In 2024, the racial breakdown of Harvard College’s admitted students barely budged: Asian students made up 37 percent of the class (the same as the year before), Black enrollment dropped from 18 percent to 14 percent, and Latino or Hispanic students increased from 14 percent to 16 percent. Yet, as The Harvard Crimson points out, inconsistencies in the school’s calculations have left some uncertainty about the real impact of the ruling.
Adding to the confusion, Harvard announced in October 2024 that it would no longer release admissions data in May, as had been its tradition. Instead, the admissions office now shares the profile of the incoming freshman class in the fall, when the College is required to report statistics to the Department of Education. The official explanation: compliance with the Supreme Court’s decision. But critics, including many on the political right, argue that this move is designed to obscure the immediate effects of the affirmative action ban.
Harvard Law School, meanwhile, saw a dramatic shift in its first J.D. class admitted after the Supreme Court’s ruling. Overall minority enrollment, and specifically Black and Hispanic student numbers, dropped sharply. At the same time, both white and Asian enrollment jumped substantially. Under McMahon’s new reporting requirements, Harvard College will now have to provide statistics not just about admitted students, but about its entire applicant pool—a level of transparency the university has long resisted.
The Trump administration’s push for data disclosure isn’t limited to Harvard. In recent months, the federal government settled with Brown University and Columbia University over similar complaints, requiring both schools to provide additional admissions and race data beyond what’s typically collected. Now, with the new policy broadening the disclosure requirement to all U.S. universities, no institution can escape the spotlight. As The Harvard Crimson notes, this move “removes a possible concession from the University’s ongoing negotiations” with the federal government over a range of grievances, including accusations of racial discrimination and failure to combat antisemitism.
The debate over race in admissions is nothing new, but the intensity has reached a fever pitch. According to The New York Post, the last five years have seen universities “rush to the very woke-est concepts of ‘justice’,” with race-based admissions policies becoming an even stronger priority. The editorial board argues that these policies have unfairly disadvantaged Asian Americans—both East and South Asians—while sometimes conferring advantages on immigrants of African descent whose families arrived recently. “In short, the Ivy League and all the rest are every bit as obsessed with simple skin color as any Jim Crow white supremacist,” the editorial charged, adding that the rationale for these policies is often based on “scant and seriously faulty” research.
Supporters of affirmative action insist that considering race is necessary to address the legacy of past discrimination and to ensure a diverse learning environment. But the Trump administration and its allies counter that true equality can only be achieved through income-based preferences, not what they see as “the beyond-lazy categorization of everyone by skin color.” As the New York Post put it, “Imagining you have a hard empirical basis for your bigotry is all too human, and admitting that you don’t is deeply challenging for all the folks who’ve believed for decades that they’re fighting racism with these policies.”
The new data reporting requirements are designed, at least in part, to force universities to confront these uncomfortable questions. By making admissions statistics “easily accessible and intelligibly presented for parents and students,” as Trump’s order puts it, the hope is to shed light on practices that have long been shrouded in secrecy. Yet, as The Harvard Crimson notes, these new disclosures may still leave the internal workings of admissions offices opaque. After all, numbers alone can’t reveal the nuanced, often subjective judgments that go into selecting a class.
Harvard and other elite schools now find themselves in a double bind. If their demographics show little change in response to the Supreme Court ruling, they risk public backlash and possible litigation for allegedly flouting the law. But if there’s a dramatic drop in enrollment of underrepresented minorities, they’ll face accusations of abandoning their commitment to diversity. It’s a lose-lose scenario that has left administrators walking a tightrope, trying to comply with federal mandates while staying true to their institutional values.
What comes next is anyone’s guess. The Trump administration has made it clear that it will be watching closely, and federal officials may become suspicious if elite schools don’t reduce admissions of Black and Latino students. For now, universities are scrambling to adapt, revamping their reporting systems and bracing for what could be years of legal and political battles. One thing is certain: the era of secretive admissions is ending, and a new age of transparency—however fraught—is dawning in American higher education.