A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from forcing universities to submit seven years of extensive data for applicants and admitted students \u2014 including grade-point averages and test scores \u2014 to prove they don\u2019t illegally consider race in admissions.<\/p>\n
Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV of the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts issued his order Friday night in response to a lawsuit brought by California and 16 other Democratic-led states.<\/p>\n
The judge\u2019s preliminary injunction applies only to public colleges and universities in the states that sued while the case proceeds through litigation.<\/p>\n
For now, the ruling grants a reprieve to the University of California and California State University systems, which said in court filings that the data request was onerous, rushed, risked student privacy and required administrators to track down hard-to-find information for hundreds of thousands of students that individual campuses log differently. In addition to race and GPA information, the Trump administration has asked for standardized test scores, grant aid amounts and family income.<\/p>\n
Separately this week, Saylor also granted an extension until April 14 for members of the Assn. of American Universities to submit the same data while the group argues for a further block of the order for its 69 U.S schools. The association\u2019s members include Stanford and USC.<\/p>\n
California accuses government of \u2018fishing expedition\u2019<\/p>\n
The U.S. Department of Education\u2019s new policy, announced in August, widely expanded long-standing federal data collection from universities. It said schools must share the information by March 18. <\/p>\n
Saylor twice extended the deadline while he considered arguments from both sides on an injunction.<\/p>\n
Trump administration officials said they requested the information from schools to prove they do not illegally consider race in admissions. The Supreme Court struck down such<\/a> affirmative action policies in 2023.<\/p>\n In that case, justices said colleges could consider how race has shaped students\u2019 lives if they wrote about the theme in admissions essays. In California, Proposition 209 has banned<\/a> public colleges and universities from considering race in admissions since 1997.<\/p>\n In filing California\u2019s suit against the Trump administration, Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta called the request a \u201cfishing expedition\u201d that was \u201cdemanding unprecedented amounts of data from our colleges and universities under the guise of enforcing civil rights law.\u201d<\/p>\n Democratic states argued in their legal complaint that the government was turning the nonpartisan National Center for Education Statistics into a \u201cmechanism for law enforcement and the furthering of partisan policy aims.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump higher education probes<\/p>\n The Trump administration has accused several elite institutions, including the UC system, of breaking the law by using race in admissions and discriminating against white and Asian American students. This year, the government joined a lawsuit against UCLA in federal court, alleging that the David Geffen School of Medicine illegally practices affirmative action<\/a>. UC and UCLA have said they follow federal and California law.<\/p>\n