You can’t reason with a sledgehammer. Higher education continues to confront that fact as the Trump administration keeps striking at the foundations of the college admissions process.
In May, the Department of Justice sent letters to the medical schools of Yale University and the University of California at Los Angeles alleging that they were illegally discriminating against white and Asian American applicants. The letters cited differences in the median standardized-test scores and grade-point averages of racial subgroups as evidence of alleged wrongdoing. In June, the DOJ, which says it’s investigating more than a dozen other medical programs, alleged that the University of California at Davis’s medical school has been deliberately favoring Black and Hispanic applicants.
Those developments likely foreshadow what’s in store for a broader swath of higher education, legal and policy experts say. The Education Department has indicated that it will release data from the Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement, or ACTS, later this year. That’s the controversial new survey the Trump administration created to collect seven years of extensive admissions and demographic information on applicants, admits, and enrolled students — at the graduate and undergraduate level — from approximately 2,000 selective four-year institutions. The stated purposes of the survey are to expose “unlawful practices” and uncover possible evidence of “race-based preferencing.”
