What Trump really wants from colleges

Speaker 1 Let me take you back to June of 2023.

Speaker 2 Good morning. We're coming on the air because the Supreme Court has just released a major decision concerning one of the most defining cases brought before the justices this term.

Speaker 3 The Supreme Court today struck down race-conscious admissions policies, often called affirmative action, at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.

Speaker 5 For too long, many universities have wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual's identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin.

Speaker 5 Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.

Speaker 1 When colleges and universities were told to stop factoring race into admissions, many of them started asking applicants to instead describe obstacles that they'd overcome.

Speaker 1 The Trump administration thinks this is a sneaky way of getting around the Supreme Court's ruling and says it's going to require colleges to start submitting data proving that they are not breaking the rules.

Speaker 1 Coming up on Today, Explain from Fox.

Speaker 3 Support for today's show comes from ATT, the network that helps Americans make connections according to ATT. When you compare, there's no comparison.
ATT.

Speaker 6 Adobe Acrobat Studio, so brand new. Show me all the things PDFs can do.
Do your work with ease and speed. PDF spaces is all you need.
Do hours of research in an instant.

Speaker 6 With key insights from an AI assistant. Pick a template with a click.
Now your preso looks super slick. Close that deal, yeah, you won.
Do that, doing that, did that, done.

Speaker 6 Now you can do that, do that with with Acrobat. Now you can do that, do that, with the all-new Acrobat.
It's time to do your best work with the all-new Adobe Acrobat Studio.

Speaker 7 Adler, here.

Speaker 8 Anderson here.

Speaker 2 Today,

Speaker 2 explained.

Speaker 9 He's sick.

Speaker 1 I'm Noel King with Eric Hoover. He's a senior writer with the Chronicle of Higher Education, where he covers college.

Speaker 1 All right, so last week, President Trump signed a memo that makes an ask or makes a demand of colleges and universities. What's the ask?

Speaker 11 So colleges will now have to report data disaggregated by race and gender for three subgroups.

Speaker 11 And those subgroups are all applicants in a given year, all the admitted students in a given year, and then the cohort of enrolled students, right?

Speaker 11 In other words, the freshman class that ends up attending each college.

Speaker 8 President Trump taking aim at higher ed again.

Speaker 8 Thursday, signing a memorandum ordering all colleges submit data to prove they don't consider race in the admissions process.

Speaker 12 This is a continued pattern of the government probing into universities' practices in admissions.

Speaker 4 Legal experts say the new order could have a chilling effect on universities and experts say the order could wind up making wealth even more influential in admissions.

Speaker 11 We don't know exactly what data the government is going to be asking colleges for. They haven't spelled that out.

Speaker 11 All we know is that colleges will have to include what the government has called quantitative measures of applicants, admitted students, and enrolled students, academic achievements, and those measures will include standardized test scores, high school grade point averages, and other applicant characteristics.

Speaker 11 We don't know what other applicant characteristics beyond grades and test scores will end up being. That remains to be seen.

Speaker 11 A clue to what all colleges will be asked to hand over now perhaps lies in the terms of the agreements that Columbia University and Brown University recently signed with the Trump administration.

Speaker 11 And what Columbia and Brown have agreed to do already is those institutions are now required for the next three years to turn over to the federal government government disaggregated data by race and ethnicity on all applicants who applied, all of those applicants who were admitted, and then all of those admitted students who end up enrolling.

Speaker 1 So is it possible that Columbia and Brown cutting these deals actually emboldens the Trump administration to say, okay, everybody else now has to do it too?

Speaker 11 I think it's possible. I don't have any knowledge of whether things would have gone gone differently if Columbia and or Brown had dug in.

Speaker 11 But I do think it's likely though that this pot was already boiling, that this was already something being cooked up, right?

Speaker 11 The Trump administration has all year long been kind of giving it to higher ed, right?

Speaker 13 These students can't add two and two and they go to Harvard. They want remedial math and they're going to teach remedial math at Harvard.
Now wait a minute. So why would they get in?

Speaker 13 How can somebody that can't add or has very basic skills, how do they get into Harvard? Why?

Speaker 11 And has been, I would say, almost obsessively hunting down details about colleges' diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies and programs and trying to eradicate those.

Speaker 11 And so I think some people felt like this was going to be the next shoe to drop, doing something big, broad, and bold to peer into the college admissions process and ask colleges to do something that they had never been asked to do before.

Speaker 1 In 2023, the Supreme Court hands down a ruling that basically ends race-based affirmative action.

Speaker 1 The Trump administration with this memo seems to be suggesting we don't believe that you guys, you elite colleges, really stopped doing it.

Speaker 11 That is exactly right. There is a...
There's suspicion, I would say deep suspicion on the part of the government and many conservative activists who scrutinize admissions all the time.

Speaker 11 Yes, you can no longer consider an applicant's race per se as one of many factors in admissions. Colleges have said, we have stopped doing it to comply with the law.

Speaker 11 And now you have an administration that seems to be saying, nope, we're shaking our heads. We don't believe you.

Speaker 11 We believe that you are secretly, quietly, behind closed doors, trying to get around the impact of that ruling and that you are in some way giving an advantage to underrepresented minority students in, you know, flouting the Supreme Court decision.

Speaker 11 We have not seen proof or evidence that colleges are violating the law in that regard. I think it's fair to say that the Trump administration is hunting for that evidence.

Speaker 1 All right, so the Trump administration says, we're looking for evidence that you guys are not playing by the rules as determined by the Supreme Court two years ago.

Speaker 1 What has actually happened in the past two years? Do we have evidence that fewer black and Hispanic students are being accepted to colleges? And do we see colleges trying in ways to get around this?

Speaker 11 Yeah, well, we just have one year of data

Speaker 11 that would even begin to help us make sense of the immediate impact of the Supreme Court's ruling on affirmative action.

Speaker 11 About a year ago is when we started to see colleges releasing, as they do every year,

Speaker 11 publishing the enrollment data, broken down by race and ethnicity. And this was the first admission cycle to be completed for which the Supreme Court ruling had an effect, right?

Speaker 11 And you saw among elite, so-called elite institutions, the most selective colleges and universities, in many, if not most cases, they saw a decline, right?

Speaker 11 A drop, small or large, in the number of African-American students who are enrolling and/or the number of Hispanic students who were enrolling.

Speaker 11 But you did not see that at every single institution, right?

Speaker 11 There are a handful of private colleges where the numbers of underrepresented minority students held steady or in some cases actually increased slightly. And I think that was a key point.

Speaker 11 That was a key development, right?

Speaker 11 Students for Fair Admissions, which is the group that sued Harvard and the University of North Carolina, which led us up to the Supreme Court ruling, they pounced on a small handful of colleges that had not seen declines in underrepresented minority students.

Speaker 9 Private colleges and universities are under no

Speaker 9 FOIA requirement to explain what they're doing.

Speaker 9 Now, the University of Louis LSU, the University of Florida, could get a FOIA request and say, tell us exactly what you're doing in detail.

Speaker 9 You can't do that at Princeton.

Speaker 9 You can't do that at Rice.

Speaker 11 And they basically pointed a finger at those institutions and said, aha, you must be doing something illegal to have not seen the same outcomes, the same declines in Black and/or Hispanic students that many other elite colleges saw.

Speaker 11 And so I think from that moment, right, suspicions that were already there became even more intense.

Speaker 1 There is some real tension in the assumptions that the Trump administration is

Speaker 1 engaging in here.

Speaker 1 In particular, the idea that if the numbers of black and Hispanic students didn't go down at a particular college, it means that college must be doing something to get around the rules

Speaker 1 without considering that maybe a lot of black and Hispanic students applied to these colleges and just had really darn good test scores, right?

Speaker 1 How do you see both colleges and the administration trying to square this tension?

Speaker 11 Look, there are plenty of smart people who believe that, hey, you know what?

Speaker 11 The best way to do college admissions would really be to just look at two factors.

Speaker 11 A student's performance and score on the SAT or ACT exam for one, and then their high school grades, their high school grade point average for another.

Speaker 11 But once you have a huge group of applicants who light up the board on both metrics,

Speaker 11 you have to look at other things, right? Because you have way too many students to, you know, to possibly enroll them all who have that going for them.

Speaker 11 And this is where colleges want the public to understand, and the message often doesn't get through. Hey, we're looking at those.
Yes, you've got to bring that to the table in most cases.

Speaker 11 But beyond that, we're trying to do all kinds of other things in admissions. We're trying to look at other aspects of a student's record, for one.

Speaker 11 But as a college, we have all these wants and needs that if we're only looking at grades and test scores, there's no way to meet all those needs, right?

Speaker 11 I think there's a disconnect there between a rather simplistic setup that the government is proposing here, which is that, hey, you know what really matters? Grades and test scores.

Speaker 11 And colleges are saying, like it or not, that's not how we operate.

Speaker 1 What ultimately do you think this means for the amount of power that the Trump administration has over higher education? Like, is this an expansion?

Speaker 1 Is it maybe less of an expansion than it might at first seem? It's just a bunch of names and numbers and details.

Speaker 1 What does it all mean?

Speaker 11 We're all trying to figure that out, what it all means. I think one thing is colleges and universities have been told that they have 120 days from the release of this executive memorandum to

Speaker 11 comply with a long list of data requests.

Speaker 11 And what do we know about the National Center for Education Statistics, the part of the education department that oversees the collection and analysis and presentation of all this data.

Speaker 11 Well, that part of the education department got gutted recently.

Speaker 11 So who's going to...

Speaker 11 Who's going to take all this data and do whatever it is that is meant to be done with it and then spit it out in a way that the public, that the government can make sense of however they plan to do that, right?

Speaker 11 So this is a huge logistical challenge. Just because you put on paper that something must be done within 120 days doesn't mean that that will actually happen or happen on time.

Speaker 11 I guess the next thing I would say is why this matters, why people should care, even if they don't care about the nitty-gritty of how elite colleges work.

Speaker 11 It's clear that in this executive order, the Trump administration and the Secretary of Education are emphasizing metrics, GPAs, and standardized test scores that we know correlate with families' wealth.

Speaker 11 And if you are incentivizing colleges in any way right now to consider these metrics, these two measures, to consider them as being even more important than they were before,

Speaker 11 you're essentially incentivizing colleges to admit even more of the students who excel on those two measures.

Speaker 11 Does this take us down a road of elite colleges pulling back or rolling back their commitments to enrolling lower-income students over time. We don't know, but I think that's a definite fear.

Speaker 1 Eric Hoover of the Chronicle of Higher Education, coming up, a lefty lawyer argued for years that race-conscious admissions should be overturned.

Speaker 1 He ended up siding with conservatives in that 2023 Supreme Court case. We're gonna ask whether he has any regrets about how things have turned out.

Speaker 3 Support for J Explain comes from AT ⁇ T. There's nothing worse than needing to make a call and realizing you can't connect, says AT ⁇ T.

Speaker 3 And of course, every wireless provider will claim that they're the best, but AT ⁇ T says AT ⁇ T has the goods to back it up.

Speaker 3 According to Root Metrics, AT ⁇ T earned the best overall network performance.

Speaker 3 While the other guys are busy making claims they can't keep, AT ⁇ T says they're making connections on America's fastest and most reliable wireless network.

Speaker 3 No matter if you're at a concert, a huge sporting event, or just out enjoying nature, you can post when you want to post. Don't post when you're enjoying nature, guys.
Keep it in control.

Speaker 3 Call when you want to call and rest easy knowing that no matter where you go, AT ⁇ T has got you covered. When you compare, there's no comparison.
AT ⁇ T.

Speaker 3 Based on Root Metrics United States Route Score Report 1H2025 tested with best commercially available smartphones, smartphones on three national mobile networks across all available network types, your experiences may vary.

Speaker 3 Root Metrics rankings are not an endorsement of AT ⁇ T.

Speaker 3 Support for J Explain comes from AT ⁇ T. There's nothing worse than needing to make a call and realizing you can't connect, says AT ⁇ T.

Speaker 3 And of course, every wireless provider will claim that they're the best. But AT ⁇ T says AT ⁇ T has the goods to back it up.

Speaker 3 According to Root Metrics, AT ⁇ T earned the best overall network performance.

Speaker 3 While the other guys are busy making claims they can't keep, AT ⁇ T says they're making connections on America's fastest and most reliable wireless network.

Speaker 3 No matter if you're at a concert, a huge sporting event, or just out enjoying nature, you can post when you want to post. Don't post when you're enjoying nature, guys.
Keep it in control.

Speaker 3 Call when you want to call, and rest easy knowing that no matter where you go, ATT has got you covered. When you compare, there's no comparison.
ATT.

Speaker 3 Based on Root Metrics United States Route Score Report 1H2025 tested with best commercially available smartphones, smartphones on three national mobile networks across all available network types, your experiences may vary.

Speaker 3 Root Metrics rankings are not an endorsement of ATT.

Speaker 3 Support for Today Explain comes from Udacity. Udacity says they can help you prepare yourself to be able to use IT.

Speaker 3 Udacity is an online learning platform. It has courses in AI and tech, generative AI, agentic AI, Python, data science, so much more.

Speaker 3 When you learn with Udacity, according to Udacity, you're not just passively watching videos or reading articles, maybe even books, you're doing practical exercises and projects that prepare you for the job you want.

Speaker 3 That's why they claim 90% of Udacity graduates surveyed say they achieved their enrollment goal. Udacity just launched a master's degree in AI.

Speaker 3 When you have a certification from Udacity, they say recruiters and employers take notice. You can check out Udacity today.
The tech field is always evolving. You should be too.

Speaker 3 You can try Udacity risk-free for seven days. You can head to udacity.com slash explained.
Use code explained for 40% off your order. Once again, udacity.com slash explained for 40% off.

Speaker 3 Make sure you use the promo code EXPLAIND.

Speaker 9 Roll some.

Speaker 3 Rolling. This is Today Explained.

Speaker 7 Action.

Speaker 10 I'm Richard Collenberg, and I am director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute.

Speaker 1 The Progressive Policy Institute, I would take it to mean that you are a progressive?

Speaker 10 So it's complicated these days. I'm left of center.
I can think of myself more as liberal than progressive.

Speaker 1 I ask because you testified as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the case Students for Fair Admission. This is the case that essentially gutted race-based affirmative action.

Speaker 1 It doesn't sound like a progressive or even a left-of-center position.

Speaker 1 What was going on? Explain what you were thinking.

Speaker 10 So I've long been a supporter of racial diversity in colleges. I think that's enormously important.

Speaker 10 But I've been troubled that elite colleges were racially integrated but economically segregated. And so I think there's a better way of creating racial diversity,

Speaker 10 a more liberal way, if you will, which is to give economically disadvantaged students of all races, you know, low-income and working working-class students who are black, Hispanic, white, or Asian, a leg up in the admissions process in order to create both racial and economic diversity.

Speaker 1 What was the data that you looked at that led you to believe that

Speaker 1 it was primarily, you know, wealthy black and Hispanic students that were benefiting from affirmative action?

Speaker 10 So there had been a number of studies over the years that had

Speaker 10 come to that conclusion, including from supporters of race-based affirmative action. It was primarily more privileged black and Hispanic students who benefited from race-based affirmative action.

Speaker 10 And then in the litigation, further evidence came out. So at Harvard, 71%

Speaker 10 of the black and

Speaker 10 Hispanic students came from the most socioeconomically privileged, 20%,

Speaker 10 of the black and Hispanic population nationally. Now, to be clear, the white and Asian students were even richer.

Speaker 10 But for the most part, this was not a program that was benefiting kind of who many Americans would think of as the most deserving applicants for, you know, special consideration.

Speaker 10 That is, working-class students and low-income students.

Speaker 1 All right. So the Supreme Court in 2023 hands down this decision that says essentially we're done with race-based affirmative action.

Speaker 1 Was there a difference in how progressives interpreted the Supreme Court ruling and how conservatives interpreted the Supreme Court ruling?

Speaker 10 I would say there's a difference between how progressives interpreted it and how kind of extreme conservatives interpreted it, because

Speaker 10 most mainstream conservatives have always said

Speaker 10 they were

Speaker 10 opposed to racial preferences, but of course they were for economic affirmative action.

Speaker 10 But now some on the extreme, extreme, including the Trump administration, saying that economic affirmative action is also illegal if part of the rationale for the policy is seeking to increase racial diversity.

Speaker 1 Yeah, what do you make of that? That was your team once upon a time, right?

Speaker 10 Well, I think it's,

Speaker 10 you know,

Speaker 10 it's troubling when people shift the goalposts. And it was clear that in a number of the Supreme Court concurring opinions in the case that conservatives said

Speaker 10 that economic affirmative action made a lot of sense. Justice Gorsuch, for example, said if Harvard got rid of legacy preferences and

Speaker 10 preferences for faculty and instead gave economic affirmative action,

Speaker 10 that

Speaker 10 that would be perfectly legal. So there would been a long-standing conservative position in favor of economic affirmative action.
And now some extremists are shifting their position and

Speaker 10 saying they're opposed to any kind of affirmative action, whether race-based or economic-based.

Speaker 1 Aren't you surprised by that shift?

Speaker 10 I don't know that I'm surprised.

Speaker 10 I'm confident, however, that a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court won't go that far.

Speaker 10 The Supreme Court,

Speaker 10 to some degree,

Speaker 10 looks to public opinion. And racial preferences were always unpopular.
But economic affirmative action is broadly supported by the public.

Speaker 10 The Supreme Court has had two cases come before it subsequent to the students for fair admissions versus Harvard decision.

Speaker 10 One involved a challenge to class-based affirmative action at Thomas Jefferson High School in Northern Virginia, and the other involved an attack on a similar class-based affirmative action program at Boston, the Boston exam schools, like Boston Latin.

Speaker 10 And in both cases, the U.S. Supreme Court said, we're not going to hear those cases over the vehement dissent of a couple of extremely conservative justices.

Speaker 10 So I think I'm fairly confident that the U.S. Supreme Court will not go down the path of striking down economic-based preferences.

Speaker 1 What do you make of this move by the Trump administration to ask colleges for data? And as we heard it it described earlier in the show, maybe catch colleges secretly doing affirmative action anyway.

Speaker 10 Yeah, so I'm of two minds about it. I do think transparency is good in higher education.
These institutions are receiving lots of taxpayer money.

Speaker 10 We want to make sure they're following the law, following the Supreme Court ruling, which said you can't use race,

Speaker 10 because

Speaker 10 You know, we don't know whether institutions are cheating or not. And so

Speaker 10 we don't want want institutions to break the law. Having said that, I'm quite nervous about how the Trump administration will use the data, because if a college discloses

Speaker 10 the average SAT scores and grades by race

Speaker 10 of applicants,

Speaker 10 of those admitted, and then those enrolled, one of two things can be going on. One is that the university is cheating and they're using racial preferences, and that would be a violation of the law.

Speaker 10 The other possibility is that they did shift to economic affirmative action, which is perfectly legal. And because black and Hispanic students are disproportionately low-income and working class,

Speaker 10 they will disproportionately benefit from a class-based affirmative action program. And so the average SCT score is going to look somewhat lower.

Speaker 10 And so I'm worried that the Trump administration will go after both race-based and class-based affirmative action.

Speaker 1 Because class-based affirmative action still might mean a college is admitting more black and Hispanic students. And what the Trump administration seems to have the issue with is that fact.

Speaker 10 Yes, increasingly that's what it looks like. I mean,

Speaker 10 as long as

Speaker 10 the Trump administration was focused on, you know, counting race and deciding who gets ahead, he had the American, you know, the administration had the American public

Speaker 10 on their side. But Americans

Speaker 10 also support the idea of racially integrated student bodies. They just don't like racial preferences as the means for getting there.

Speaker 10 So if Trump says, no matter how you achieve this racial diversity, I'm just opposed to racial diversity, he'll have lost the public.

Speaker 10 And I don't think he will be consistent with the legal framework under Students for Fair Admissions either.

Speaker 1 Do you think he cares?

Speaker 10 Well,

Speaker 10 I think he ought to care if he cares about the future of

Speaker 10 his political party, because

Speaker 10 under class-based affirmative action,

Speaker 10 it is true that black and Hispanic students will disproportionately benefit, but it will also benefit white working-class students.

Speaker 10 And those are the students who are coming from families that form the base of the Republican Party. So I think it would be a big mistake if the Trump administration were to really push hard on

Speaker 10 that angle.

Speaker 1 Richard Collenberg is the director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute. Guess where Richard went to college? Gabrielle Bourbay produced today's show.

Speaker 1 Amina El Saadi edited. Laura Bullard checks the facts.
Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristen's daughter are our engineers. And I'm Noelle King.
It's Today Explained.

Speaker 7 What do walking 10,000 steps every day, eating five servings of fruits and veggies, and getting eight hours of sleep have in common? They're all healthy choices.

Speaker 7 But do all healthier choices really pay off? With prescription plans from CVS CareMark, they do.

Speaker 7 Their plan designs give your members more choice, which gives your members more ways to get on, stay on, and manage their meds.

Speaker 7 And that helps your business control your costs because healthier members are better for business. Go to cmk.co/slash access to learn more about helping your members members stay adherent.

Speaker 7 That's cmk.co/access.

Speaker 14 Mercury knows that to an entrepreneur, every financial move means more. An international wire means working with the best contractors on any continent.

Speaker 14 A credit card on day one means creating an ad campaign on day two. And a business loan means loading up on inventory for Black Friday.

Speaker 14 That's why Mercury offers banking that does more, all in one place, so that doing just about anything with your money feels effortless. Visit mercury.com to learn more.

Speaker 14 Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group column NA and Evolve Bank and Trust members FDIC.