Is Admissions Trump’s Next Higher Ed Target?

Last month the government cut $400 million in federal funding for Columbia University and sent a list of demands the university would have to meet to get it back. Among them: “deliver a plan for comprehensive admission reform.”

The administration sent a similar letter earlier this month to Harvard University after freezing $9 billion in funding, demanding that the university “adopt and implement merit-based admissions policies” and “cease all preferences based on race, color, ethnicity or national origin in admissions.”

And in March the Department of Justice launched investigations into admissions practices at Stanford University and three University of California campuses, accusing them of defying the Supreme Court’s decision banning affirmative action in June 2023’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

Exactly what the Trump administration believes is going on behind closed doors in highly selective college admissions offices remains unclear. The University of California system has been prohibited from considering race in admissions since the state outlawed the practice in 1996, and both Harvard and Columbia have publicly documented changes to their admissions policies post-SFFA, including barring admissions officers from accessing the applicant pool’s demographic data.

Regardless, given the DOJ investigations and demands of Columbia and Harvard—not to mention potential demands at newly targeted institutions like Princeton, Northwestern and Brown—the federal government appears set to launch a crusade against admissions offices.

A spokesperson for the Education Department did not respond to multiple questions from Inside Higher Ed, including a request to clarify what “comprehensive admission reform” means and what evidence the administration has that admissions decisions at Columbia and Harvard are not merit-based, or that they continue to consider race even after the SFFA ruling.

Columbia acquiesced to many of the Trump administration’s demands, but it’s not clear if admissions reform is one of those concessions. When asked, a Columbia spokesperson said that “at this moment” the university had nothing to add beyond the university’s March 21 letter to the administration.

In that letter, Columbia officials wrote that they would “review our admissions procedures to ensure they reflect best practices,” adding that they’d “established an advisory group to analyze recent trends in enrollment and report to the President” on “concerns over discrimination against a particular group.”

Interestingly, Columbia officials also wrote that they would investigate “a recent downturn in both Jewish and African American enrollment.”

A Harvard spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed that the university’s “admissions practices comply with all applicable laws,” but they declined to answer additional questions about potential changes to admission policies or whether they’d received clarification from the Trump administration.

Angel Pérez, president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, said the vague demands on college admissions offices are intentional, and that the administration is “setting institutions up for failure.”

“Institutions are certainly going to defend their process, but it’s going to be chaotic and it’s going to be noisy … it’s almost like we are seeing SFFA play itself out all over again,” he said. “Is there the potential that it could change some things about the [admissions] process? Absolutely. We just don’t know what that would look like.”

Orwell in the Reading Room

If the Trump administration’s specific grievances with selective admissions are murky, then its plan to enforce “reform” is downright opaque. However, officials have offered some hints.

In a December op-ed in The Washington Examiner, which outlined a plan that so far reflects the Trump administration’s higher education agenda with uncanny accuracy, American Enterprise Institute fellow Max Eden suggested “a never-ending compliance review” targeting Harvard and others to enforce the SFFA ruling. In his view, admissions officers should not discuss applicants or make decisions without a federal agent present to ensure they don’t even obliquely discuss race.

“[They] should assign Office of [sic] Civil Rights employees to the Harvard admissions office and direct the university to hold no admissions meeting without their physical presence,” Eden wrote. “The Office of Civil Rights should be copied on every email correspondence, and Harvard should be forced to provide a written rationale for every admissions decision to ensure nondiscrimination.”

Eden now works for the Trump administration, though it’s not clear in what capacity. Inside Higher Ed located a White House email address for him, but he did not respond to several interview requests in time for publication.

Edward Blum, the president of Students for Fair Admissions and the architect of the affirmative action ban, told Inside Higher Ed he thinks rigorous federal oversight of admissions offices is sorely needed.

“Requiring competitive colleges and universities to disclose in granular detail their admissions practices to various federal agencies is an important and wise decision,” he wrote in an email.

Pérez said that level of intrusion on a college admissions office’s process would effectively destroy the profession.

“If that were to happen, I can unequivocally tell you that we are not going to have people who want to do this work,” he said. “We know how critically important it is. But how many more headwinds can they face before they begin to ask themselves, is this really worth it?”

Crusade in Search of a Problem

Test-optional admissions policies are likely to become a magnet for federal scrutiny. In a February Dear Colleague letter instructing colleges to eliminate all race-conscious programming, the Education Department wrote that test-optional policies could be “proxies for race” to help colleges “give preference” to certain racial groups.

Columbia is one of the few Ivy League institutions to retain the test-optional policy it put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic; Harvard reinstated testing requirements this past application cycle.

Personal essays may also fall under the Trump administration’s microscope. Hard-line affirmative action critics have suggested that colleges may be effectively circumventing the Supreme Court’s ban by imputing an applicant’s race from their essays. Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion said that practice should be tolerated as long as an applicant’s identity is considered in the context of their personal journey. But his vaguely self-contradictory language—he added a caveat that said essays should not be used as a “proxy” for racial consideration—has engendered fierce debate over the role of the essay in applicant reviews.

Last month the University of Austin, an unaccredited new college in Texas with ideologically conservative roots, announced it would consider only standardized test scores when admitting applicants, disregarding essays, GPA and recommendation letters.

“Admissions at elite colleges now come down to who you know, your identity group or how well you play the game,” a university official wrote in announcing the policy. “This system rewards manipulation, not merit.”

Blum suspects many selective colleges of disregarding the affirmative action ban and said he was especially skeptical of those that reported higher or stable enrollments of racial minorities this fall, including Yale, Duke and Princeton. In an interview with Inside Higher Ed in February, he said he expects those institutions to invoke scrutiny from the courts and the Trump administration.

But both Columbia and Harvard reported declines in underrepresented minority enrollment last fall, especially Black students. At Harvard, Black enrollment fell by 4 percentage points, from 18 percent for the Class of 2027 to 14 percent of the Class of 2028; at Columbia Black enrollment fell by 12 points, from 20 percent to 8 percent. (This paragraph has been updated to correct Harvard's Black enrollment figures.)

Pérez said that colleges that reported higher underrepresented minority enrollment have a simple explanation: demographic trends.

“The truth is that the majority of students applying to institutions right now are incredibly diverse and will only get more diverse,” he said. “You’re putting colleges in an impossible position if you’re penalizing them for having a more diverse applicant pool.”

Eric Staab, vice president of admissions and financial aid at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., said his institution isn’t concerned about drawing the Trump administration’s ire, despite going test-blind this year and maintaining a stable level of racial diversity.

For one, he said, he’s not sure the Office for Civil Rights will be staffed well enough to take on more than a handful of target institutions after the Education Department’s mass layoffs last month. Even if it is, Staab said he’s confident that post-SFFA, investigators wouldn’t find anything illegal or even objectionable at Lewis & Clark.

“Admissions has always been a merit-based process … with the [SFFA decision], pretty much all of us needed to do some tweaking or major overhaul of our admissions and financial aid policies, and we did that,” he said. “I’m not worried about them sending people into reading sessions, because we have nothing to cover up.”

But Pérez said there could be a broader chilling effect across admissions offices if the Trump administration pursues a more aggressive approach to its “admissions reform” agenda.

“Institutions are asking questions of the DOJ and other departments to try to get clarity, but therein lies the challenge: They have not been given clarity, so they don’t know how to prepare,” he said. “That lack of clarity is causing chaos.”