The Trump administration’s executive order demanding that universities disclose the race, test scores and grade point averages of all applicants raises the stakes in a bitter battle that has already upended college admissions in recent years.

Colleges will face even more intense scrutiny over their admissions practices as the administration pushes them to rely more heavily on quantitative measures, which experts say could result in wealthier, less diverse student populations at elite universities.

For a century, higher education has been embroiled in a debate over who should be admitted into the country’s most selective colleges. It is a fight that cuts to the core of the nation’s most difficult ideological divides, over merit, equal opportunity and the legacy of racism.

On one side, colleges have argued that considering students’ life experiences — including their races — creates diverse student bodies that are beneficial to everyone and corrects for decades of discrimination. But a conservative movement has questioned the use of such subjective criteria in admissions, arguing that the practice has led to discrimination against white and Asian students.

Two years ago, conservatives, led by an organization called Students for Fair Admissions, won a victory in the Supreme Court, when a majority of the justices deemed the consideration of race in college admissions unconstitutional.

Universities have been scrambling to rearrange their admissions processes to comply with the ruling ever since. The president’s order builds on the court decision, but also goes further, by giving the federal government information that it could use to target colleges it thinks are not complying.

James Murphy, director of postsecondary policy at Education Reform Now, a left-leaning advocacy group, said the new disclosure requirements would increase incentives to enroll wealthy students, who often score higher on standardized tests because of a range of advantages that start early in life.

“I think the incentives that this creates are a big deal,” Dr. Murphy said. “It is creating pressure on colleges to focus on higher G.P.A.s and higher test scores.”

The factors that elite colleges use to admit students have caused conflict for decades.

In the early 20th century, colleges considered intangible factors such as character, leadership and athleticism. They mattered as much as — or more — than grades or scores. But those criteria were also often used to depress the representation of certain groups, such as Jewish students.

After World War II, when the United States faced increased military and scientific competition from the Soviet Union, selective universities began to assign greater weight to academic factors, including the SAT, said Nicholas Lemann, who has written about the history of standardized testing and is a professor of journalism at Columbia University.

That push soon came into tension with the demands from the civil rights movement to open elite institutions to a more diverse group of students.

Decades of research shows a strong link between family income and students’ test scores — a link that makes it difficult to create diverse student bodies using test scores alone. By the time students take the SAT, research shows, those from the highest-income households are seven times as likely to score at least 1300, compared with students from the poorest families.

Among students who graduated from high school in 2024 and took the SAT, 1 percent of Black students scored between 1400 and 1600, the highest possible score, according to the College Board, the private organization that administers the test. Similarly, 2 percent of Hispanic test takers scored in that range.

By contrast, 7 percent of white test takers and 27 percent of Asian students scored between 1400 and 1600.

These days in the United States, there are few academically elite institutions at any level — high school or college — that admit students based only on test scores, in part because of disparities in test outcomes.

But it is also because colleges also often give preferences to the children of alumni, along with fencers, French horn players and students with many other specialized skills thought to contribute to the campus community. Applicants are also evaluated on gauges of economic adversity, such as whether students have to work to support themselves.

Professor Lemann said that because there is such a strong relationship between income and standardized test scores, the Trump administration’s attempt to pressure colleges to weigh tests more heavily could “resegregate elite higher education — let’s call that for what it is.”

He added, “It’s a chimera to think there is one way to pick the class that will make everybody happy.”

Anthony Abraham Jack, a professor of higher education at Boston University, raised concerns that the order would lead to “a quota system for wealthy and white students” and added, “If your class is too brown, too poor, then somehow you rigged the system.”

He emphasized that admissions should be about context.

“If you have a student who gets a 5 in A.P. calculus, that doesn’t give you a relative understanding of how good they are,” he said. “What if they’re the only young woman in the entire state to get a 5 in A.P. calc? That tells you how amazing that person is.”

Groups like Students for Fair Admissions have said such subjective measures could sometimes result in discrimination against high-performing groups, particularly Asian students, similar to the way universities once treated Jewish students.

Edward Blum, the head of Students for Fair Admissions, said that broadly considering talents, interests, characteristics and other experiences could continue.

“That’s fine,” Mr. Blum said. “What is not fine is to use any holistic measurement as a proxy for race.”

Under the new order, the information will be reported publicly in a federal database called the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or IPEDS.

In a news release Thursday, the education secretary, Linda McMahon, said the new requirements “will enable the American public to assess whether schools are passing over the most qualified students in favor of others based on their race.”

Many colleges released enrollment data last fall showing that the percentages of Black and Hispanic students had already dropped as a result of the 2023 Supreme Court decision.

As the Trump administration pushes colleges to move to a system that is more focused on merit, critics argue that merit should also include the full range of factors in a student’s life, beyond quantitative test scores.

Richard Kahlenberg, a researcher at the Progressive Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, supports class-based affirmative action, which would give preferences to students from lower income groups.

“My argument all along has been it is more meritocratic to look at a 1400 SAT score,” Mr. Kahlenberg said, “and consider information on whether the student who earned that score went to private school, had all sorts of advantages in life, or worked two jobs and went to a lousy school and managed to score really high anyway.”

Harry Feder, executive director of FairTest, an organization that has opposed standardized testing, said the executive order might give colleges a further incentive to drop the use of standardized tests altogether.

“At some level, I think the universities, when they use test scores, are playing a dangerous game in terms of opening themselves up to lawsuits,” he said. “They’ll be scrutinized, and their race data is going to be scrutinized.”

While President Trump’s other moves against colleges have often faced swift legal challenges, this latest order appeared to rest on the broad legal authority that the Department of Education has to collect a wide range of data from institutions where students can use federal aid. Still, it could face legal challenges if, for example, colleges or outside groups make the case that sharing some data could violate students’ privacy rights.

Dr. Murphy and Dr. Jack both predicted that the order would prompt litigation.

Roxanne Garza, the director of higher education policy at EdTrust, a policy group focused on racial and economic barriers in education, said that more data about which students are admitted into which colleges could be useful. It could help students know exactly what is needed to get into certain colleges, for example.

“The collection of the data in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing,” she said.

But she said the focus on race seemed to be designed to call into question whether students of color were deserving of being admitted.

“Why are we also not asking institutions to publish their data on legacy admissions or donor preference admissions?” Ms. Garza said.

Anemona Hartocollis contributed reporting.