As part of the settlements struck with two Ivy League universities in recent weeks, the Trump administration will gain access to the standardized test scores and grade point averages of all applicants, including information about their race, a measure that could profoundly alter competitive college admissions.
That aspect of the agreements with Columbia and Brown, which goes well beyond the information typically provided to the government, was largely overlooked amid splashier news that the universities had promised to pay tens of millions of dollars to settle claims of violations of federal anti-discrimination laws, including accusations that they had tolerated antisemitism.
The release of such data has been on the wish list of conservatives who are searching for evidence that universities are dodging a 2023 Supreme Court decision barring the consideration of race in college admissions, and will probably be sought in the future from many more of them.
But college officials and experts who support using factors beyond test scores worry that the government — or private groups or individuals — will use the data to file new discrimination charges against universities and threaten their federal funding.
The Trump administration is using every lever it can to push elite college admissions offices toward what it regards as “merit-based” processes that more heavily weigh grades and test scores, arguing that softer measures, such as asking applicants about their life challenges or considering where they live, may be illegal proxies for considering race.
The additional scrutiny is likely to resonate in admissions offices nationwide. It could cause some universities to reconsider techniques like recruitment efforts focused on high schools whose students are predominantly people of color, or accepting students who have outstanding qualifications in some areas but subpar test scores, even if they believe such actions are legal.
“The Trump administration’s ambition here is to send a chill through admissions offices all over the country,” said Justin Driver, a Yale Law School professor who just wrote a book about the Supreme Court and affirmative action and who said he believed that the administration’s understanding of the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision was wrong. “They are trying to get universities to depress Black and brown enrollment.”
The Trump administration has celebrated getting this data as part of its war on “woke” university policies such as affirmative action and diversity, equity and inclusion programs that it says discriminate based on race.
“Because of the Trump administration’s resolution agreement with Brown University, aspiring students will be judged solely on their merits, not their race or sex,” Linda McMahon, the secretary of education, said when the Brown deal was announced, echoing similar comments she had made about Columbia.
“Woke is officially DEAD at Brown,” President Trump proclaimed on Truth Social in announcing the deal.
The public release of race-related data on admissions could also be valuable to conservative groups who have become the self-appointed enforcers of the Supreme Court decision.
“If this information were obtainable by a Freedom of Information Act request or made public, it would be of great interest,” said Adam Mortara, one of the lawyers for Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiff in the Supreme Court affirmative action case. “If we could get this and analyze it, we would because we are constantly vigilant and looking out for those who seem not to have gotten the message.”
Columbia and Brown will have to maintain “merit-based admissions policies,” according to their settlements, which codify the administration’s broader aims in legally binding language.
The universities “may not by any means unlawfully preference applicants based on race, color or national origin in admissions throughout its programs,” both agreements state in identical language. “No proxy for racial admission will be tolerated.”
The admissions disclosures will provide the government with data on accepted and rejected applicants broken down by “race, color, grade point average and performance on standardized tests.” While it is not clear what Brown and Columbia’s data will reveal, general data shows that admissions systems that are focused on standardized tests typically help Asian students and harm the chances of Black students.
Of the high school graduates who scored between 1400 and 1600 on the SAT in 2024, the highest possible scores, 1 percent were African American, and 27 percent were Asian, according to the College Board, the private organization that administers the test. About 12 percent of students taking the test were Black and 10 percent were Asian. Some experts consider the tests to be unfair because there are score gaps by race and class.
Student demographics at Columbia and Brown had already started to shift as the 2023 Supreme Court decision took effect.
Among first-year undergraduates entering Columbia in fall 2024, 39 percent were Asian and 12 percent were Black. In the fall of 2023, the entering class was 30 percent Asian and 20 percent Black. (White and Hispanic enrollment dropped slightly from 2023 to 2024).
At Brown, Asian and white first-year enrollment went up from fall 2023 to fall 2024, while Hispanic and Black enrollment decreased. Not all Ivy League universities, however, showed the same effect.
Applicants to Columbia have the option of not submitting standardized test scores, complicating any analysis. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, a federal statistical agency, about 61 percent of first-year Columbia undergraduates in fall 2023 had submitted test scores. Brown has returned to requiring test scores from applicants.
In a letter to the campus, Christina H. Paxson, the president of Brown, said that the federal government was already entitled to the new data from Brown or any other university as part of compliance with civil rights laws.
She said she was not worried about releasing the material, saying it would “demonstrate the strong academic qualifications of the classes we admit while remaining committed to welcoming students from a wide range of backgrounds.”
Columbia also explained in a recent fact sheet that the data would be anonymized and that it had an obligation to comply with the law.
“We have agreed to provide data to which the government is entitled, and is currently requesting from scores of institutions, including ours,” Claire Shipman, Columbia’s acting president, said when the deal was announced.
The Trump administration already appears to be asking for similar data under subpoena. In March, Attorney General Pam Bondi directed the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division to review admissions policies at Stanford University and three University of California institutions: U.C.L.A., Berkeley and Irvine.
“The Department of Justice will put an end to a shameful system in which someone’s race matters more than their ability,” Chad Mizelle, the acting associate attorney general, said in March. “Every college and university should know that illegal discrimination in admissions will be investigated and eliminated.”
The language used in the settlements with Columbia and Brown hammers home contested assertions about the Supreme Court admissions case that the Trump administration has been making since February.
It insists that the decision goes beyond admissions and bars any consideration of race in university life. Many legal experts disagree with this interpretation and point out that the decision pointedly said that colleges could still consider, on a case-by-case basis, “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise.”
“The law is clear: Treating students differently on the basis of race to achieve nebulous goals such as diversity, racial balancing, social justice or equity is illegal under controlling Supreme Court precedent,” the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights argued in an official guidance letter to all educational institutions in February.
Under this thinking, colleges could not lawfully eliminate the use of standardized testing in admissions if doing so was part of an effort to achieve a desired racial balance or to increase racial diversity. Federal law would also not allow race to be considered in hiring, promotion, scholarships or housing decisions.
“If an educational institution treats a person of one race differently than it treats another person because of that person’s race, the educational institution violates the law,” the February letter said.
Enforcement of that guidance document was put on hold in April because of a legal challenge. Last week, Ms. Bondi made another attempt to make her interpretation of the Supreme Court decision enforceable, providing similar guidance that applies to all entities receiving federal funding.
Ms. Bondi’s guidance states that even seemingly race-neutral criteria, such as asking an applicant about “cultural competence” or “lived experience,” or targeting recruitment based on geography, violates federal law if it is designed or applied with the intention of giving an advantage to applicants based on protected characteristics, such as race.
Even a scholarship program that targets “underserved geographic areas” or “first-generation students” would not be legal if those criteria are chosen to increase participation by specific racial or sex-based groups, the guidance states.
“I think transparency is a good thing, and if Columbia is not using racial preferences, they should have nothing to hide,” said Richard Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, a left-of-center think tank. Mr. Kahlenberg has pushed for class-conscious rather than race-conscious college admissions. But the data the government is demanding could be misused, he said, to suggest that “any attempt to create racial diversity even by race-neutral means is problematic.”