Trump wants admissions data on grades and race, but who will collect it?

Boston Globe

a day ago

Of about 100 employees who worked at the National Center for Education Statistics, just four remain.
'Who is going to analyze that data?' said Angel Pérez, CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.
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In his second term, Trump has often taken a paradoxical approach to education, pushing to diminish the federal government's role, even as he tries to wield its power.
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He has ordered sweeping layoffs at the Department of Education, which he hopes to eventually shut down. And he has proposed slashing spending on education, arguing that the federal government adds bureaucratic bloat and has not improved student outcomes.
Still, he has often used federal funding as a powerful tool to get schools and universities on board with his agenda, something he invoked again Thursday with his executive order.
In the order, Trump turned to Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965, threatening the federal financial aid colleges receive for students if they refused to comply. He used a similar strategy this spring, when he threatened to withhold federal money for low-income students from public school districts that did not comply with his rules on diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
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The federal government provides about $115 billion a year in financial aid for college students, money that goes to colleges — and then to students — in the form of loans, Pell Grants and work-study arrangements.
The money is crucial for the vast majority of colleges. 'They want to be able to offer it, because that is how many students pay the bill for tuition, room and board and they are able to afford to come,' said Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
As a condition of receiving the federal money, colleges must respond to surveys from the federal government.
The data provides a variety of detailed information on every college, including faculty-to-student ratios, the cost of tuition and the average amount of financial aid. 'The goal is to help potential students make better decisions,' Kelchen said.
Trump wants to add admissions data to the list, including the race, gender, SAT scores and grade-point averages of students — both those who were accepted and those who were rejected.
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said the move would provide 'full transparency' to ensure that universities are not using race as a preference in admissions. In 2023, the Supreme Court struck down race-based affirmative action after a conservative group, Students for Fair Admissions, brought lawsuits against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina.
'It should not take years of legal proceedings, and millions of dollars in litigation fees, to elicit data from taxpayer-funded institutions that identifies whether they are discriminating against hardworking American applicants,' McMahon said.
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Even critics who fear how the Trump administration may use the data say it could be helpful, particularly as they track the shifting landscape after the Supreme Court decision.
'Are fewer students of color now applying to selective institutions?' said Wil Del Pilar, senior vice president at EdTrust, an advocacy group for low-income students and students of color. 'We have historically not had that data.'
Still, Del Pilar said that the mandate from Trump was circumventing the usual process for changing data collection, which typically involves a lengthy process. He said he had for years pushed the government to survey colleges about how many of its students are parents, for example, without success.
The directive from Trump puts new pressure on the National Center for Education Statistics, which under federal law provides nonpartisan information about education with 'the highest methodological standards.'
Previously, there were at least seven federal employees at NCES who worked full time or part time on the college dataset, helping to ensure accuracy and comparability across colleges.
All seven of those employees were laid off in March as part of broader layoffs at the Department of Education.
The department had historically relied on contractors to do much of the data collection, something Madi Biedermann, a spokesperson for the Department of Education, said would continue. 'That work is all done through contracts that are still maintained by the department,' she said in a statement.
Sheria Smith, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents fired employees from the Department of Education, said that former federal workers had been responsible for ensuring that the data collected by contractors was 'good data.'
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'We don't have any quality control, because those people have been fired,' she said.
She saw it as part of a larger strategy by the Trump administration, which has fired scientists and data experts in agencies across government.
'When you fire the professionals, the statisticians, the scientists that can analyze the data, that allows you to make up whatever facts you want,' Smith said.
This article originally appeared in
.