Dive Brief:
- A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the U.S. Department of Education from enforcing a deadlinefor public colleges in 17 states to submit admissions data broken down by race and sex. The same court previously delayed the deadline twice.
- U.S. District Court Judge F. Dennis Saylor concludedthat the data collection was generally within the scope of the department’s legal authority, but the rushed timeline likely violated theAdministrative Procedure Act, which regulates federal agencies’ rulemaking processes.
- The Association of American Universitiesand the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts have also asked to join the lawsuit, with a hearing set for April 13 to consider their request.Saylor delayed the deadline for their member institutions to submit the data until after that hearing.
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Dive Insight:
Last August, President Donald Trump issued a directive calling on colleges to submit broad sets of data — including on the race and sex of their applicants, admitted students and those who chose to enroll —to the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics.
The administration’s aim was to enforce the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling striking down race-conscious admissions in legal challenges brought against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“The Trump Administration will ensure that meritocracy and excellence once again characterize American higher education,” U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said following the president’s directive.
Trump’s memo gave McMahon and the Education Department 120 days to begin collecting volumes of new data from colleges. NCES opened its survey — which is required for selective four-year colleges — in mid-December, with a deadline of March 18.
But, as Saylor pointed out in his ruling, “Even then, the survey was not finalized.”
NCES made major changes to the template for its survey— which, among other things, asks for admission test scores and grade point averages broken down by sex and race —in January and February.
Seventeen Democrat attorneys general sued in March,calling the department’s rulemaking process “sloppy” and requesting the court to block the implementation of the data collection altogether.
“There is no way for institutions to reasonably deliver accurate data in the federal government’s rushed and arbitrary timeframe,” Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell said in a statement at the time.
Plaintiffs also argued that the data collection could be used by the administration to target colleges with, in Campbell’s words, “baseless investigations.”
But Saylor — a George W. Bush appointee —wrote that the data collection, including for the purposes of legal investigations, was within the Education Department’s authority.
“The facilitation of educational decisionmaking necessarily includes identifying potential problems (such as patterns of discrimination),” the judge wrote.
Saylor chiefly found fault with the short timeline for data collection and what he described as a “failure of NCES to engage meaningfully” with public commenters who raised concerns about the data collection during the notice-and-comment period.He wrote that the agency’s handling of the process “epitomizes arbitrary and capricious agency action” and was likely in violatation of the APA.
While the department during the case pointed to the timeline required in Trump’s directive, Saylor found that “neither the President, nor the Secretary, nor the agency ever explained the purpose of the truncated timeline.”
Saylor said he’d rule later on the privacy concerns raised by plaintiffs over the data collection and made clear his order of a preliminary injunction didn’t rest on those issues.
But he did voice concerns about how NCES could effectively handle the data when its staffing has been gutted by the Trump administration, which is openly working to dismantle the Education Department.
The agency “never even acknowledged the existence of the staff reductions, much less explain how its reduced staff will be able to keep up with an increased workload,” Saylor wrote. “Nor did it explain how the hollowed-out agency will be able to effectively conduct disclosure risk reviews, identify inaccurate data, and develop useful statistical analyses.”
On Friday, several groups of private colleges also asked to join the litigation.