A federal judge in Massachusetts blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to collect seven years worth of admissions data on the race of applicants from public universities.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order last August directing the Department of Education to get this information. Affirmative action was effectively ended in 2023 by the Supreme Court, but Trump, in his order, said a “persistent lack of available data,” as well as the use of “diversity statements and other overt and hidden racial proxies,” suggested that race was still being used in admissions.
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Under the order, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, in coordination with the National Center for Education Statistics, was given 120 days to expand the scope of The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System and require schools to include information on applicants’ race, ethnicity and gender, test score and family’s income, among other factors.
A coalition of 17 states, including Massachusetts, sued the Trump administration over the data collection, with Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell saying that there “is no way for institutions to reasonably deliver accurate data in the federal government’s rushed and arbitrary time frame, and it is unfair for schools to be threatened with fines, potential losses of funding and baseless investigations should they not fulfill the Administration’s request.”
“This Administration’s unlawful and haphazard actions are threatening the well-being of Massachusetts students and the prosperity of our colleges and universities,” Campbell said at the time.
U.S. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor on Friday granted the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction.
He said in his ruling that the “120-day deadline imposed by the President led directly to the failure of NCES to engage meaningfully with the institutions during the notice-and-comment process to address the multitude of problems presented by the new requirements.”
“The principal problem, then, lies not in the basic authority of NCES to collect, analyze,
and make use of the data,” he said. “Rather, it arises from the rushed and chaotic manner in which the
Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement was promulgated.”
These issues, Saylor said, are “compounded by the fact that DOE is in the process of dismantling
itself, and closing NCES, in response to another presidential directive.”
Trump signed an order to begin the process of abolishing the Department of Education last May. Closing the department would require an act of Congress, though the administration still laid off staff.
“This is not a merely technical issue,” Saylor wrote. “The IPEDS process cannot be turned over to states and local communities; they have no authority under 20 U.S.C. § 9543(a)(3) to conduct such surveys. Nor, for that matter, does any federal agency other than NCES.”
Saylor also mentioned the closure of the Education Department during court hearings reported on by Law360, and questioned the government’s claim that it considered potential issues with collecting data on a mass scale.
The federal government, for its part, argued that this data collection is necessary to make sure schools are complying with the Supreme Court’s ruling in the affirmative action case.
Despite some of his misgivings about the timeline, Saylor did still rule that “at least at a general level, it seems clear that NCES can lawfully collect the requested data.”
“One of the principal purposes of collecting and analyzing information about race, ethnicity, and similar demographics is to ascertain whether there are potentially troublesome anomalies or patterns that suggest the possibility of unlawful discrimination,” Saylor said.
