17 states sue to block Trump’s HE admissions data demand

Federal District Judge F Dennis Saylor IV will decide on 6 April whether to extend an injunction he granted in mid-March blocking a Department of Education (DoE) demand that universities across the United States submit seven years’ worth of admissions and other student data, disaggregated by race and gender.

The DoE said it was demanding the data “to ensure [that] race-based preferences are not used in university admissions processes”.

The injunction was granted on 13 March, two days after 17 Democratic-led states attorneys general petitioned the United States District Court, District of Massachusetts, to quash Secretary of Education Linda McMahon’s order for the data under a new Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement (ACTS) survey.

McMahon’s order for this data to be collected is the second demand for such extraordinary information made by the administration of President Donald J Trump in the past few months.

On Tuesday 31 March, the Trump administration won a legal battle over attempts by the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) to avoid compliance with a US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) subpoena requesting, under the aegis of investigating “antisemitic harassment through its workplaces”, “identification of witnesses to and victims of the religious-based harassment, including their contact information”.

The subpoena does not mention Jews or Jewish employees. Yet, the phrase “antisemitic harassment” means the EEOC is seeking personal data – including emails, addresses and phone numbers – as well as information about whether a Jewish individual was affiliated with on-campus Jewish groups or in the Jewish Studies department.

The decision is expected to be contested on the grounds of increased risk to the safety of Jewish people whose data is handed over if the list of data submitted should become public.

Link to affirmative action case

On 7 August 2025, in a written statement that announced the order, McMahon justified the need for including quantitative measures of applicants’ and admitted students’ academic achievements, such as standardised test scores, GPAs and other applicant characteristics – information hitherto retained by institutions – by referencing the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) to overturn affirmative action three years ago in the case Students For Fair Admissions v Harvard (SFFA).

“Following the revelations of rampant racial preferencing in college admissions exposed by SFFA v Harvard, the Trump administration is now standardising 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. Going forward, universities will be required to provide this data directly to us through an existing data system.

“We will not allow institutions to blight the dreams of students by presuming that their skin colour matters more than their hard work and accomplishments. The Trump administration will ensure that meritocracy and excellence once again characterise American higher education,” said McMahon.

In the press release in which he announced that California was going to court to challenge ACTS and “make sure that the Trump administration” follows the law, the state’s attorney general Rob Bonta said McMahon was going on a “fishing expedition” and accused her of “demanding unprecedented amounts of data from our colleges and universities under the guise of civil rights law.”

Then, turning the tables, Bonta added: “This is the same administration, I’ll remind you, that gutted the US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, leaving thousands of civil rights complaints and investigations in limbo. This latest sham demand threatens to turn a reliable tool into a partisan bludgeon.”

Letitia James, Bonta’s New York State counterpart, went considerably further than Bonta’s folksy metaphor – to the darker story of the Salem witch trials of 1692.

“Colleges and universities should not be forced to turn over massive amounts of sensitive student data to satisfy another witch hunt. We are going to court to stop this unlawful mandate and protect institutions and students across the country,” she wrote in a statement.

According to Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education (ACE), McMahon’s order goes far beyond the SFFA decision.

“All [the SCOTUS] said was: ‘You can’t use race as a determining factor’, even though they also said diversity is really important.”

The granular level of the information that ACTS will capture includes recommendation letters, which could indicate extracurricular activities such as being on an athletic team or if the applicant is a cellist. Admissions officers care about such information because they “want to get a better picture of what those numbers [GPA and test scores] mean”.

Speaking for the thousands of America’s institutions of higher learning, Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, said: “On the procedural level, the states are arguing that the Department of Education changed reporting requirements without proper legal process, potentially violating laws like the Administrative Procedure Act.

“But the bottom line is, this isn’t just about data. It's about whether the federal government can unilaterally shape how universities operate.”

In their case against the government, “states representing institutions are concerned about the administrative burden imposed on staff at colleges and universities, the data privacy and data security for students, the quality of the data that will be gathered and the misuse of it in terms of continued weaponising of funds or the weaponisation of antisemitism and international students,” said Pasquerella.

“It [the survey] seems to selectively focus on race and gender, and while there's mention of legacy admits and tracking athletes, it seems to just be an exacerbation of this attack on diversity, equity and inclusion in ways that reinforce belonging uncertainty among students of colour,” she said.

Political neutrality

The state attorneys general filed the suit against the DoE and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the department that is meant to ensure that other departments’ actions adhere to statute.

The attorneys general argue that McMahon’s order violates the legal requirement that the Integrated Postsecondary Education System (IPEDS) data collection system (which provides the data for ACTS) must be politically “neutral”; colleges and universities must be part of IPEDS to participate in federally funded vocational and student aid programmes.

Additionally, the attorneys general argue that handing over this data could compromise student privacy. Further, the suit argues that the short timeline set by McMahon – 120 days to produce data going back to the 2019 and 2020 academic year – puts an undue burden on colleges and universities and is likely to result in “error-ridden” reports to the government.

The petition tells the court that both McMahon’s order and Trump’s executive order (issued several hours before McMahon’s order), which McMahon cites as one pillar of her authority, are legally defective.

Trump’s order, Ensuring Transparency in Higher Education Admissions: “asserts with no factual basis, that ‘IPEDS requires long-overdue technological upgrades to expand its data collection and fulfil its mission effectively”, say the attorneys general.

Neither in this executive order nor in any other document does Trump indicate “what upgrades are needed, what IPEDS’ mission is, or how it is that IPEDS has purportedly failed to fulfil that mission,” the petition states.

McMahon’s order “to expand the scope of the collection for enrolled cohorts to include data for each race-and-sex pair’s graduation rates, final GPA, financial aid offered, financial aid provided, and other relevant measures” as well as any additional information needed “to ensure IPEDS fulfils the mission of providing transparency in admissions” directly contravenes the statutory authority granted by Congress, says the petition.

For, the petition notes, the law which governs the Institute for Education Sciences (IES), the arm of the DoE which overseas IPEDS, states that the IES’s mandate is “to collect, analyse, and report education information and statistics in a manner that is objective, secular, neutral, and nonideological and is free of partisan political influence and racial, gender, or regional bias”.

According to the court filing, McMahon’s explanation for why the ACTS was needed (quoted above: “revelations of rampant racial preferencing in college admissions exposed by SFFA v Harvard) makes clear that the DoE “will no longer be acting within the confines of these statutory mandates with respect to their implementation of the IPED ACTS survey” but, rather, will be treating it as “a fishing expedition to obtain onerous, extra-court discovery on the admissions practices of Institutes of Higher Education across the country”.

Put simply, the attorneys general are saying that the secretary of education has announced publicly that she intends to break the law.

The changes to IPEDS McMahon ordered were gazetted in the Federal Register on 15 August. In response to a question in the “request for comment” section, the government said the new information collected by the IES will be used “to establish a baseline of admissions practices from before the Supreme Court decision in SFFA v Harvard”, and may be used “to develop risk-based enforcement practices”.

Yet, says the petition, the IES is not legally “charged with monitoring or enforcing the law, which is exactly what is contemplated through the addition of the ACTS survey to IPEDS”. In other words, there is no legislative authority to use the IPEDS for any of these purposes.

Another response in the “request for comment” section identifies diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes as the source of the need for the changes McMahon ordered: “[T]he continued widespread emphasis on [DEI] in higher education causes concerns that unlawful practices may persist because DEI has been used as a pretext to advance overt and insidious racist discrimination.”

However, while a number of Trump’s executive orders demand an end to DEI programmes, the orders fail to define DEI. Unlike at the state level, for example, in Florida and Texas, at the federal level there is no law outlawing DEI, nor has the SCOTUS declared DEI to be unconstitutional. Accordingly, the petition says that rather than being law, doing away with DEI “is a policy goal” of the administration.

As such, McMahon’s “explicit reference to DEI as a target of these additional data reporting requirements belies any claim that the IPEDS ACTS survey is consistent with this mandate”, which is to “act free from the influence of partisan politics”, say the attorneys general.

Threat to privacy

The threat to student privacy comes from the granular level of detail that the DoE is demanding. The states argue that “the level of disaggregation of the data – with data spliced across multiple categories, including race, gender, GPA, test scores, income level, and academic programme – poses a risk that information submitted by IHEs [institutions of higher education] may inadvertently reveal the identity of students, thus jeopardising IHEs’ obligations to maintain student privacy.”

The petition explains the mechanics of how a student could be identified by pointing to how “cells [of information] cut across five or more factors – [and] may result in reporting cells so small (say, a handful of students or even a single student per IHE) that no statistical conclusions could be drawn, and the statistical validity of the sample would be minimal.

“The small cell size also poses a significant risk for student privacy, with the level of disaggregation creating the possibility of inadvertently identifying individual students and revealing highly personal information regarding those students, such as financial aid and GPA”.

The states further argue that colleges and universities are subject to the (federal) Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (1974) as well as other federal and state laws that “restrict how and when they can share student information”.

Given that McMahon has stated that the government’s ultimate goal is to “provide … transparency in admissions”, the plaintiffs assert, “it is likely this information will be made public. Even if it is not, however, information submitted through ACTS could be subject to public records requests or Freedom of Information Act requests”.

The publication of such information puts colleges and universities in a double bind. “How to protect students’ privacy, at the same time that they face the risks of hefty fines and loss of federal funding.”

In its amicus curiae brief to the court, ACE took a moment to speak from the students’ point of view. They “trust that the sensitive personal information they provide to their institutions – including information about their race, family income, grades, test scores, and financial aid – will be safeguarded.

Now, however, ambiguity around how student data may be used and made public risks violating that trust.

Nor did the DoE or the OMB conduct a “privacy impact assessment” as required under the E-Government Act (E-GA, 2002), the plaintiffs assert.

Government agenda

In an interview conducted before Judge Gerald Pappert’s decision on the UPenn case was announced, Matthew A Hamermesh, an attorney with the Philadelphia law firm of Hangley Aronchick Segal Pudlin & Schiller, which represented Jewish law school students at UPenn, explained to University World News that while the specifics of the case involving UPenn and the one brought by the 17 state attorneys general differ, there is a family resemblance.

“Substantively, they’re part of an effort by the government in different aspects – Department of Education and EEOC – to promote the government’s agenda in terms of what kinds of [civil rights] cases they want to pursue.

“There are differences, but their generalised attack on DEI and, as they would frame it, their defence against antisemitism, are both goals of the administration that they are pursuing here in similar ways,” he said.

For his part, John Aubrey Douglass, senior research fellow, public policy and higher education at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California – Berkeley, who responded by e-mail to University World News before Judge Pappert’s decision became public, averred that these “fishing expeditions” constitute “a new strategy that makes selected deals like those at Columbia University and Brown University ephemeral”; in signed agreements that restored hundreds of millions of dollars of frozen research funds, both universities agreed to supply the DoE with admissions data to ensure they were complying with the government’s anti-DEI agenda.

This new strategy, Douglass said: “offer further leverage for Trump officials to impose penalties for campuses still in the throes of supposed negotiations”.

“The DoE’s escalating demands for information on students, faculty and staff from universities, if successfully upheld in the courts, [are] opening a Pandora's box of personal privacy rights violations and further eroding the autonomy of colleges and universities,” said Douglass.