Data whiplash

How the Trump administration is leading on established data policy to pursue its new higher ed goals.

Trump’s executive order to revamp federal higher education data collection as a way to enforce his administration’s agenda to eliminate all diversity and equity goals in selective college and program admission was striking to me because of how similar the substance of his proposal was to the ordinary plays made by the center and center-left higher ed policy community. What the administration proposes doing to reduce diversity is almost the same as what policy groups wanted to maintain diversity following the Supreme Court decision that curtailed affirmative action. The difference is that the policy groups were thinking about contested methods for achieving what they assumed to be a stable goal, whereas Trump is maintaining continuity of method to impose a new goal.

Let me explain.

A focus on means

In our forthcoming book, The Postliberal University, Barrett J. Taylor and I argue that the higher education policy community mistakenly assumed an essentially stable consensus about the country’s goals for higher ed. Disagreement, then, was seen to be less about core goals and more about the relative emphasis of those goals and especially about the means for achieving them.

Conventional wisdom assumed that most policymakers wanted to promote access to affordable, high-quality, higher education programs. Sure, not everyone had the same ideas about what made education high-quality or how to make higher ed affordable. Yet the notion that it should be high-quality and affordable was understood as the consensus. Following this thinking, great students from all backgrounds should be eligible for selective colleges and programs, but there was disagreement over how students should be selected.

The use of race was a particular source of contention about the means for selecting students. For liberals, the race-conscious admissions practices were seen as a useful, if imperfect, means to getting great students into selective colleges and programs by affirmatively acting to recognize and take steps to ameliorate centuries of racial discrimination. For conservatives, the use of race gave students of color an unfair advantage because they were believed to be treated favorably as members of a group rather than fairly as individuals.

I am not a lawyer, but this conservative rationale is my understanding of the basic logic behind the Supreme Court’s majority decision in SFFA v Harvard. SFFA dramatically limited the scope of race-conscious admissions in higher education nationwide. I say that it dramatically limited the scope of race-conscious admissions rather than banned affirmative action because the Roberts court seemed, especially to the policy community, to leave the door open for some limited use of race.

Katharine Meyer, a government and education scholar, put it this way in a Brookings analysis:

Further, the decision makes explicit that students can continue to reference their racial and ethnic identities in college essays and interviews and colleges can take those experiences into account in application review; however, the decision cautions such references and the role they play in admissions decisions must be tied to individual, non-racial characteristics. For example, colleges can give weight to a student’s “courage and determination” to overcome racial discrimination during holistic review. This is an important victory for those who worried that the decision would severely limit students’ ability to speak about how their racial identity shaped their experiences. However, that guidance will be difficult to implement in practice and is ripe for future legal challenges. While much remains to be understood about the SFFA decision and its impact, one clear takeaway is that this will not be the last word on how race can factor into college admissions.

While SFFA was seen as a blow to effective policy and practice, in my assessment, most of the conventional higher education policy community believed that the goal of getting great students into selective colleges and programs was preserved. They also recognized that the means for achieving that would have to change. Race could be used to assess an applicant’s qualifications individually, but not in any group or categorical way. Because how that could play out effectively and legally within the post-SFFA framework was unclear, more data and evidence were needed to determine the best means for achieving a more or less intact goal.

Faced with ambiguity about the means for achieving a goal, the higher education policy community turned to its old friends: data and analysis. In May 2024, higher education policy and advocacy organizations sent a letter to the then Biden US Department of Education’s Chief Data Officer requesting short-term changes and long-term considerations for the Integrated Postsecondary Data System (IPEDS). One of their top requests was “Disaggregation of the Admissions survey by race and ethnicity, admit decisions, and other student categories”.

IPEDS is a data system consisting of topical surveys (enrollment, finance, admission, etc) that campuses must complete and submit annually. You can track campuses in IPEDS data back to 1972, though the surveys change slightly over time. IPEDS is the best source of comprehensive organizational data for colleges and universities in the US, and is probably the best national higher educational data system in the world. Higher ed researchers, policy analysts, and advocates have used IPEDS to monitor policy effects and to identify possible solutions to achieve goals.

The 24 signatories of the letter wanted these more granular data because:

Adding new race and ethnicity reporting categories, new student categories such as transfer-in students, and new admit decision disaggregations for first-time students will enable critical research on equity in college admissions and inform institutional, state, and federal policies and practices to increase college access for diverse student populations.

In other words, the policy community assumed the contest was still about the means for getting great students into selective programs. Their recommendations, penned in May 2024, came less than a year after the Supreme Court put strict limits on the use of race in college admission practices. The data could be used to find permissible and effective means.

And the changes that these policy groups recommended appear to have been implemented. In work that began under the Biden administration, the 2025-26 IPEDS admission survey includes the changes captured in the screenshot below.

It’s the goals, not the means

Fast forward 15 months from the letter to Trump’s executive order yesterday, which calls for using IPEDS to hold campuses accountable for not considering race in any way in admission. While Trump likes splashy announcements through executive orders, the changes to IPEDS he directed were, so far as I can tell, mostly underway and are pretty darn similar to the changes requested by the mainstream and mostly center-left policy groups in May 2024. What changed, then, was not the means for achieving goals, but the goals themselves.

The executive order explains the administration’s goals in direct terms:

American students and taxpayers deserve confidence in the fairness and integrity of our Nation’s institutions of higher education, including confidence that they are recruiting and training capable future doctors, engineers, scientists, and other critical workers vital to the next generations of American prosperity. Race-based admissions practices are not only unfair, but also threaten our national security and well-being. It is therefore the policy of my Administration to ensure institutions of higher education receiving Federal financial assistance are transparent in their admissions practices.

Angel B. Pérez, CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, explained to Inside Higher Ed what the executive order clearly means:

What the Trump administration is really saying is that you will be punished if you do not admit enough white students to your institution.

I fully agree with Pérez’s assessment. The administration hopes to use disaggregated admission data to enforce something like the re-segregation of selective colleges and programs. I wrote about this in the context of professional programs a couple of weeks ago. Yet just over a year ago, Pérez’s group signed onto the letter asking the Department of Education to collect the very kind of data Trump says he’s going to use to enforce what Pérez describes as the administration’s agenda to get more white students into selective colleges and programs.

To be clear, I don’t fault the National Association for College Admission Counseling for signing the letter. My point is that the higher ed policy community as a whole was still working in the world of means in 2024. By that time, it had become clear that big disagreements were actually about goals. I think everyone sees that now. How the higher education policy community will adapt is an open question.

Ok, enough.