Trump ordered NCES to collect race-disaggregated admissions data from colleges, bypassing required APA notice-and-comment

On August 7, 2025, President Trump issued Presidential Memorandum DCPD-202500837, directing the Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics to collect race- and sex-disaggregated admissions data from colleges and universities nationwide. The directive required institutions to document their applicant pool, admitted cohort, and enrolled cohort by race and sex — along with standardized test scores, GPAs, and other applicant characteristics — retroactively for seven years. The stated rationale was to verify that colleges were not using race as a factor in admissions decisions following the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

The memorandum imposed a presidentially mandated 120-day deadline on NCES to expand the required reporting scope and make the new requirements public. That compressed timeline caused NCES to implement the data collection without completing the Administrative Procedure Act's required notice-and-comment rulemaking process, preventing universities from meaningfully engaging with the agency on the mandate's numerous implementation problems. Education Secretary Linda McMahon set an initial submission deadline of March 18, 2026, and threatened action under Title IV of the Higher Education Act against colleges that failed to submit timely, complete, and accurate data.

The directive raised privacy concerns because it required institutions to submit personal applicant data — including race, sex, and academic records — to a federal agency that critics argued lacked adequate staff to process or analyze it lawfully. Only three staff members remained at NCES as of the directive's issuance. A coalition of 17 Democratic state attorneys general subsequently sued to block the mandate, arguing it risked invading student privacy and exposing universities to politically motivated investigations without statutory authority for the compressed collection process.

Updates

2026-03-16 — Judge Saylor temporarily extended March 18 deadline twice, to March 25 then April 6 [7, 8]

U.S. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV (D. Mass.) issued a temporary restraining order on March 16, 2026, postponing the March 18 submission deadline by one week for colleges in the 17 plaintiff states, then extended the deadline again on March 24 to April 6, 2026, as he prepared to rule on the pending preliminary injunction motion.

2026-04-03 — Judge Saylor granted preliminary injunction for 17 plaintiff-state public universities [4, 5, 6]

Judge Saylor granted a preliminary injunction limited to public universities in the 17 plaintiff states, finding the administration likely has underlying authority to collect the data but that the presidentially-imposed 120-day deadline caused NCES to skip required notice-and-comment, calling the rollout "rushed and chaotic." The judge wrote: "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."