President Donald Trump is expected to sign a directive on Thursday, mandating universities provide admissions data to prove that they are not implementing affirmative action policies, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on X.
Leavitt did not disclose the criteria that the administration will use to determine whether schools are practicing race-conscious admissions.
It comes after Ivy League universities Columbia and Brown last month struck settlements that require them to release information about applicants’ race in addition to test scores and academic performance, amid a monthslong back-and-forth with the Trump administration over federal funding. The settlement has stoked debates about academic freedom and the role of government institutions in higher education.
The directive comes more than two years after the Supreme Court struck down the use of affirmative action programs at the University of North Carolina and Harvard, ruling that the consideration of race in the admissions process in both programs violated the Equal Protection Clause of the constitution. Conservative activists, who argued that the policy led to discrimination against white and Asian students, considered the ruling a major victory.
The controversial ruling, however, was heavily criticized by many others who argued that race-conscious admissions provided an avenue for students from marginalized communities to combat historical racial discrimination in the higher education system.
“But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a dissenting opinion. “And having so detached itself from this country’s actual past and present experiences, the Court has now been lured into interfering with the crucial work that UNC and other institutions of higher learning are doing to solve America’s real-world problems.”
The Trump administration has continued to aggressively crack down on diversity, equity and inclusion-related programs, signing an executive order in his first week in office directing all departments and agencies to terminate what it considered to be “discriminatory and illegal preferences, mandates, policies, programs” and more.
