17 progressive state attorney generals sued the Education Department on March 11 “arguing that its new order demanding voluminous piles of student admissions data in an attempt to thwart covert affirmative action is onerous, untenable, and in some cases impossible to fulfill,” reports The College Fix. “The states are also asking the court to block the administrative demand for the data because, they argue, it is unlawful to ‘collect data to further partisan political ends.'”
A presidential memorandum, issued last August by President Donald Trump, told the Education Department to require universities to submit detailed admissions data, including race, sex, standardized test scores, and GPAs of applicants and admitted students.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon said last year that once this data was collected, it would “allow Americans to ensure race-based preferences are not used in university admissions processes.”
As The College Fix adds:
Trump’s directive instructed McMahon to overhaul the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or IPEDS, to better track the data and identify noncompliant institutions. Consequences could include penalties, such as loss of federal funding, if universities failed to comply.
The states in their lawsuit argue the directive is too much — especially since the Education Department is now demanding retroactive data from the past seven years.
The data request “is unprecedented in scope, seeking a vast array of disaggregated data from the 2025-2026 academic year and six prior years,” say the attorney generals in their court complaint.
“Never before has IPEDS sought retroactive data; never before has IPEDS sought such a vast array of disaggregated data; and never before has the Department of Education so quickly effected a major change to IPEDS.”
Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown alleges that the department’s “rushed implementation of the new data requirements ignores the incredible burden they place on institutions and dramatically increases the possibility of inadvertent reporting errors and unreliable data.” “For example, in their haste to roll out the new requirements, ED failed to provide definitions for critical terms, leaving universities guessing what information they are supposed to provide, and facing severe financial penalties if they guess wrong. Furthermore, ED has eliminated hundreds of positions, including within the very offices responsible for providing clarity about the requirements to universities.”
The state attorney generals claim several requested data items cannot even be provided by some colleges: “Some [colleges] do not ask students to identify their race; others do not require test scores for admission.”
The attorneys general that brought this lawsuit are from the states of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.
