What Universities Don’t Want You to Know About Their Admissions

There is a simple rule in American institutional life: the entities that scream loudest about accountability are invariably the ones with the most to hide. When seventeen Democratic state attorneys general — led by California’s — filed suit in federal court on March 11th to block the Trump administration’s requirement that universities disclose their admissions data broken down by race, GPA, and standardized test scores, they inadvertently answered a question that had never quite been asked plainly enough: if these schools are complying with the law, why on earth would they need protection from scrutiny?

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, targets the Trump administration’s Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement (ACTS), which requires nearly 2,200 colleges and universities to submit seven years of admissions data — applicant pools, admitted cohorts, enrolled cohorts — disaggregated by race, sex, GPA, and standardized test scores.

The administration framed it plainly: following the Supreme Court’s landmark 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, there was reasonable cause to suspect that institutions were simply continuing their racially discriminatory practices through different proxies. The data would say whether they were. And apparently, the data is the last thing these attorneys general want released.

A Mandate Built on a Ruling, Not a Whim

To understand why this transparency requirement is not merely reasonable but legally obligatory, one must return to the Students for Fair Admissions decision itself. On June 29, 2023, the Supreme Court ruled 6-2 that the race-conscious admissions programs at both Harvard University and the University of North Carolina violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, held that the universities’ use of race lacked “sufficiently focused and measurable objectives” and effectively required racial stereotyping — categorizing students not as individuals but as representatives of their demographic group. After 45 years of expanding racial preferences in higher education, the Court drew a constitutional line.

The decision was long overdue. What the SFFA litigation revealed during years of discovery was deeply unsettling: at the University of North Carolina, over 80 percent of Black applicants in the top academic decile were admitted, while fewer than 70 percent of equally qualified white and Asian applicants made the cut. At Harvard, race functioned as what the Court described as a “determinative tip” for a significant percentage of admitted Black and Hispanic applicants. This was not the narrow, holistic consideration the Court had conditionally permitted in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003). It was a thumb — sometimes a fist — on the scale of racial preference, and it had been running essentially on the honor system for decades.

The honor system, it turned out, produced exactly the results one might expect. When President Trump issued his August 2025 memorandum ordering Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “expand the scope of required IPEDS reporting to provide adequate transparency into admissions,” he was acting on entirely reasonable suspicion. Universities had demonstrated, through years of documented behavior, that left to self-report their compliance, they would not comply. SFFA required no less than genuine enforcement.

The Accountability Gap

Much is at stake in the Democrat attorneys general’s lawsuit. American taxpayers — through federal student loans, Pell Grants, research funding, and direct institutional support — funnel more than $100 billion annually into the higher education system. State and local governments added another $139.1 billion to public colleges and universities in fiscal year 2024 alone. The federal research apparatus, primarily through NIH and NSF grants, contributed roughly $60 billion in fiscal year 2023. These are not charitable donations to independent cultural institutions. They are public investments, made on the condition that the receiving institutions comply with federal civil rights law.

The Equal Protection Clause is not a suggestion. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — which prohibits racial discrimination by any institution receiving federal funds — is not a courtesy. The Supreme Court has spoken. And yet, the response from seventeen state attorneys general and their coalition of protected universities is, in essence: trust us. We’ll continue taking the money. We simply decline to demonstrate that we’re obeying the law.

Secretary McMahon put the administration’s response succinctly: “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 Education Department spokeswoman added a question that deserves to echo in every editorial board meeting and faculty lounge in the country: “What exactly are State AGs trying to shield universities from?”

It is worth dwelling on that question. The attorneys general have argued that the data collection mandate is burdensome, rushed, and technically impractical. Some of these practical concerns are legitimate — GPA scales vary across high schools, many institutions went test-optional, and the timeline was aggressive for compiling seven years of legacy data. These are fair logistical objections, and the administration has already extended the deadline to accommodate them. But technical inconvenience is not a constitutional right. Every small business that files a tax return, every contractor that submits to a government audit, every employer that produces payroll records on demand faces bureaucratic inconvenience. The universities’ complaint is not that the task is impossible. It is that the task might reveal something.

The Ideology That Cannot Bear the Light

What might it reveal? The National Association of Scholars, which has long advocated for precisely this kind of institutional transparency, has documented a pattern of systemic ideological capture in American universities. Faculty and administrators are registered Democrat at rates exceeding 95 percent — and Georgetown Law Professor Nicholas Rosenkrantz has specified that the accurate characterization is not merely “Democrat” but “closer to the left edge of the Democratic Party.” These are not institutions of neutral inquiry. They are, in substantial measure, ideological organs that have been using the admissions process to engineer a preferred social composition — and doing so at the expense of students of Asian and Western heritage who applied with superior academic credentials and were turned away.

The SFFA litigation exposed this in granular detail. The question the ACTS data requirement now poses is simple: are they still doing it? Are “diversity statements,” holistic review criteria, and the careful deployment of essays and extracurricular weightings achieving, by other means, what racial quotas accomplished directly? One does not need to be a cynic to suspect the answer. One only needs to have watched the reaction. Seventeen states rushing to court to prevent data collection is not the behavior of institutions confident in their own compliance.

It is also worth observing that the Trump administration’s data requirement is not, as critics have suggested, some unprecedented act of federal overreach into university governance. Brown University and Columbia University — both caught up in separate disputes with the administration over campus antisemitism and research funding — already settled their cases in part by agreeing to provide this exact data: admissions statistics on race, GPA, and test scores, subject to government audit. If data transparency is so oppressive, why did two major universities agree to it as a condition of restoring their federal research funding? The answer, again, is obvious: for Brown and Columbia, the alternative was worse.

What Merit Looks Like

There is a deeper argument to be made here — one that goes beyond legal compliance and into the question of what universities are actually for.

The progressive ideology that has colonized higher education operates on a foundational assumption: that the disparate racial distribution of academic credentials is itself evidence of systemic injustice, and therefore that any admission process producing racially disproportionate outcomes is morally illegitimate. Under this logic, a meritocratic system that admits students based on GPA and standardized test scores is not neutral — it is oppressive. The only just system, in this view, is one that adjusts outcomes until they match demographic targets.

This is not a constitutional position. It is not a legal one. The Supreme Court said so plainly. And it should not take a conservative to recognize the corrosive implications of a system that tells students — particularly students of Asian heritage, who have been the most directly harmed by race preferences — that their hard work and academic achievement are insufficient because they belong to the wrong demographic category. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28, KJV). The principle that individuals are not reducible to their racial or ethnic group membership is not merely constitutional doctrine. It is a foundational moral truth.

What the universities fear, ultimately, is that transparency will force a reckoning with whether they have been delivering on their central promise — educating students according to rigorous, merit-based standards — or whether they have been operating as social engineering projects dressed in academic robes, billing the American taxpayer for the privilege.

The Question That Must Be Asked

The attorneys general suing to shield these institutions from accountability have framed themselves as defenders of university autonomy and civil rights. But consider the irony: the landmark civil rights statutes they claim to champion — Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the Equal Protection Clause — are precisely the legal foundations the Trump administration is invoking to demand compliance. The civil rights enforcement mechanism is transparency. The resistance to civil rights enforcement is the lawsuit.

One is forced to ask: would these same attorneys general rush to court if a company receiving $100 billion in federal contracts refused to disclose its hiring and promotion data? Would they defend a contractor’s “autonomy” against federal auditing requirements? Of course not. The law that governs financial accountability from federal contractors would be applied without apology. The universities’ uniqueness — the thing that supposedly exempts them from ordinary standards of public accountability — is not a legal principle. It is a political preference. It is the preference of a left-of-center political establishment that has spent decades nurturing and protecting the ideological ecosystem of higher education and does not wish to see that ecosystem disturbed.

Trump’s ACTS requirement is not a perfect instrument. The data will have gaps, the methodology will require refinement, and the administration should engage in good faith with legitimate technical concerns about consistency and privacy. But the principle — that institutions accepting federal funds must demonstrate compliance with federal civil rights law, and must do so with actual data — is not radical. It is elementary. It is what the rule of law means.

The universities had the better part of two years since SFFA to voluntarily implement transparent, merit-based admissions and demonstrate their compliance. Instead, they hired DEI consultants to redesign their processes, moved the racial preference apparatus underground, and when pressed for data, recruited seventeen state attorneys general to fight the subpoena in federal court.

The American taxpayer deserves better. The students who were denied admission because of their ancestry deserve better. And the republic, which depends on institutions that pursue truth rather than engineer outcomes, deserves better.

Secretary McMahon is right. The data should be produced. The law should be enforced. And the next time an academic administrator complains about the burden of accountability, someone should ask him — politely but firmly — what, exactly, he is afraid the data will show.