Seventeen Democrat-controlled states have launched a coordinated legal challenge against President Donald Trumps effort to bring transparency and accountability to college admissions by requiring schools to prove they are not using race as a backdoor factor in deciding who gets in.
According to The Post Millennial, the lawsuit, filed Wednesday in federal court in Boston, targets a Trump administration policy that compels colleges and universities to collect and report demographic data demonstrating compliance with the Supreme Courts 2023 ruling against affirmative action. The policy responds to mounting concerns that left-leaning institutions are using personal essays and other subjective components of applications to smuggle race-conscious preferences back into the process, despite the Courts clear rejection of such practices.
Last August, President Donald Trump ordered Education Secretary Linda McMahon to implement the reporting requirement, directing schools to submit data to provide adequate transparency into admissions. Colleges must turn over the information by March 18 or risk enforcement actions under Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965, which governs federal financial aid and represents a powerful lever over institutions that rely heavily on taxpayer-backed funding.
The coalition of 17 Democratic attorneys general is attempting to block that requirement, arguing that the administrations timeline and enforcement mechanisms are unreasonable and unlawful.
This Administrations unlawful and haphazard actions are threatening the well-being of Massachusetts students and the prosperity of our colleges and universities, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell claimed in a statement, adding, There is no way for institutions to reasonably deliver accurate data in the federal governments 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 Administrations request.
Campbell further asserted that the mandate is rushed and leaves institutions vulnerable to inadvertent errors and unreliable data that could lead to cost penalties and baseless investigations into their practices and that jeopardizes student privacy and could lead to individuals being easily identified. Her objections reflect a broader pattern among Democrat officials who routinely resist oversight when it threatens entrenched ideological preferences in higher education, particularly on race-based policies.
The Department of Education, however, has defended the policy as a basic safeguard for taxpayers and a necessary check on institutions that have long operated with minimal transparency. A department spokesperson noted that Americans invest more than $100 billion in higher education annually and therefore have every right to know whether universities are complying with the law rather than quietly reconstituting racial preferences under new labels.
The Departments efforts will expand an existing transparency tool to show how universities are taking race into consideration in admissions. What exactly are State AGs trying to shield universities from? spokesperson Ellen Keast asked pointedly. Her question underscores the core issue: whether public universities, subsidized by citizens of every race and background, should be allowed to hide how they weigh race in admissions decisions after the Supreme Court has spoken.
The Trump administrations approach also mirrors settlement agreements previously reached with Brown University and Columbia University to restore federal research funding after legal disputes.
Under those agreements, both institutions agreed to provide demographic data on admitted students, make that information public, and submit to auditsconditions that did not collapse their operations but instead imposed long-overdue accountability on elite campuses that have long treated transparency as optional.
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