Judge Blocks Trump’s Demand for Admissions Data in 17 States

A federal judge on Friday blocked in 17 states the Trump administration’s demand that public colleges and universities submit detailed race- and gender-related admissions data stretching back seven years.

The ruling, by U.S. District Court judge Dennis Saylor IV of Boston, was in response to a March 6 lawsuit by the attorneys general from the group of Democratic-led states. Their lawsuit argued that forcing colleges and universities to complete the new Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement survey was unlawful, “arbitrary and capricious” and exceeded the authority of the agency that approved it, the Office of Management and Budget. The administration said its intention is to ensure institutional compliance with the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling banning race-conscious admissions.

Saylor’s decision found that while the Trump administration has “the basic authority” to collect and analyze admissions data disaggregated by race and gender, among other things, “they do not possess the authority to do so under the circumstances presented here, given the arbitrary and capricious nature in which the ACTS was promulgated.”

He wrote that the expedited timeline prevented the decimated National Center for Education Statistics from engaging “meaningfully with the institutions during the notice-and-comment process to address the multitude of problems presented by the new requirements.” He added that such problems have been “compounded by the fact that [the Education Department] is in the process of dismantling itself, and closing NCES, in response to another presidential directive.”

The ruling applies to California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai‘i, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin. In response to the lawsuit their attorneys general filed last month, Saylor initially issued a temporary injunction that applied to all public institutions in the country, extending the original March 18 deadline for providing such information to March 25. As that date approached, he again extended the reporting deadline to April 6, but only for the states that had sued.

In a related ruling, Saylor set an April 13 hearing for two organizations seeking to intervene in the case in the hopes of winning exemption from reporting admissions data for their member institutions: the Association of American Universities and the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts.