Dozens more colleges will get a delay before they must submit extensive data on their applicants and admitted students broken down by race and sex to the U.S. Department of Education,per a federal court order handed down Tuesday.
U.S. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor has extended the deadline until April 14 for a handful of private collegesand the institutional members of several higher education associations that are seeking to join a legal challenge against the data collection. Seventeen Democratic attorneys general brought the case and recently won a court order temporarily blocking the Education Department from collecting the data from public colleges in their states.
The colleges and higher education associations receiving the new delay are:
- Barnard College, in New York.
- Bryn Mawr College, in Pennsylvania.
- Middlebury College, in Vermont.
- Sarah Lawrence College, in New York.
- Swarthmore College, in Pennsylvania.
- Vassar College, in New York.
- Connecticut Conference of Independent Colleges,with 14 member institutions.
- Maine Independent Colleges Association, with 11 member institutions.
- North Carolina Independent Colleges and Universities,with 36 member institutions.
- Oregon Alliance of Independent Colleges and Universities,with 11 member institutions.
In August,the Education Department announced it would launch a new survey following a directive from President Donald Trump ordering the National Center for Education Statistics to collect data on college applicants, admits and enrollees. Before the new collection, colleges were only required to provide racial data on their enrolled students.
The extensive survey — which went live in December — asks for information such as standardized test scores, GPA and family income broken down by race and sex.
The Education Department has said the data is needed to ensure that colleges are complying with the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling against race-conscious admissions.
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Along with data for the 2025-26 academic year, the Education Department is seeking six years’ worth of past information. Colleges and higher education groups have pushed back against the new survey, arguing that they don’t even collect some of the requested data. They’ve also pushed for more time to compile accurate data.
The Education Department did not immediately respond to a Wednesday request for comment on the new ruling.
Some of the colleges covered by the new order had already received an extension from the Education Department to fully complete the survey in return for submitting just three years of their data, according to Tuesday’s ruling.Middlebury, meanwhile, had already submitted the data, according to the ruling.
Saylor has previously extended the deadline to April 14 for two other higher education groups — the Association of American Universities, which has 69 institutional members in the U.S., and the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts, which has 58 members.
He is holding a hearing on April 13 to determine whether he will allow those two associations to permanently join the case and block the Education Department’s data collection against them while the lawsuit plays out. In Tuesday’s ruling, Saylor said he will also use that hearing to consider doing the same for the new colleges and groups seeking to join the lawsuit.
The newest ruling comes just days after Saylor blocked the Education Department from collecting the datafrom the 17 states’ public colleges. When granting that preliminary injunction, the judge wrote that the department likely violated the Administrative Procedure Act by not meaningfully responding to concerns raised by colleges about the tight timeline for the data collection.
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Saylor also raised concerns about whether the NCES could handle the new data collection with a pared-down staff. However, he wrote that the data collection was generally within the Education Department’s authority.