President Trump on Thursday ordered his Education Department to begin collecting detailed data on the race and gender of college applicants, as well as test scores and grade point averages, a shift that would allow the government to closely scrutinize whether universities are giving minorities preference in admissions.

The move would provide the government with information that has long been on the wish list of conservative activists in search of evidence that schools have been dodging a 2023 Supreme Court decision that largely barred the consideration of race in college admissions. Admissions data has increasingly become a focus of the Trump administration as part of its effort to shift the ideological balance of academia, which the president views as hostile to conservatives.

Some legal experts say the new requirements may have a chilling effect on universities, which are still allowed to consider race as part of a holistic review of a student’s application that takes into account qualifications beyond test scores.

Justin Driver, a Yale Law School professor, said the changes were “another catastrophic blow in the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on American higher education.”

“It signals the Trump administration’s efforts to depress Black and brown enrollment, and intimidate universities into decreasing Black and brown enrollment,” said Mr. Driver, author of “The Fall of Affirmative Action: Race, the Supreme Court and the Future of Higher Education.”

Some of Mr. Trump’s moves against colleges and universities have prompted swift legal challenges from opponents who accused the administration of skirting or ignoring laws, like Harvard University’s lawsuit over billions of dollars in stripped research funding.