President Donald Trump is preparing to sign an executive order that will require colleges to submit detailed admissions data to prove they are not factoring race into their admissions decisions, according to a White House fact sheet released ahead of Thursday’s signing.
The move comes after the 2023 Supreme Court ruling that struck down the use of affirmative action in college admissions. While the ruling prohibited race from being a determining factor, it allowed colleges to consider how an applicant’s race had shaped their life if discussed in essays or personal statements.
The Trump administration argues that some institutions have continued to use “personal statements” and other indirect methods as proxies for race in admissions. The fact sheet states that the lack of publicly available admissions data — combined with what it calls the “rampant use of ‘diversity statements’ and other overt and hidden racial proxies” — raises ongoing concerns about compliance with the Supreme Court’s decision.
The executive order mirrors aspects of recent settlement agreements the administration reached with Brown University and Columbia University, which restored their federal research funding. Under those agreements, the universities provided the government with applicant and student data — including race, GPA, and standardized test scores — agreed to federal audits, and committed to publishing admissions statistics.
Conservatives have long argued that, despite the ruling, many colleges still rely on race-based considerations, even if indirectly.
The first admissions cycle after the Supreme Court decision revealed no consistent national trend in campus diversity. Some institutions, like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Amherst College, saw significant declines in the share of Black students, while others, such as Yale, Princeton, and the University of Virginia, recorded changes of less than one percentage point.
In response to the ruling, some schools have expanded their use of essays or personal statements to capture applicants’ backgrounds in a way the court permits. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in 2023, universities may consider “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life” if it is “concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability” the student could bring to campus.
Even before the court’s decision, states that banned affirmative action experimented with other strategies to maintain diversity. Nine states had such bans in place prior to 2023, starting with California in 1996. The University of California saw Black and Hispanic enrollment drop by half at its most selective campuses within two years of the ban, prompting the system to spend more than $500 million on programs for low-income and first-generation students.
The UC system also launched a plan guaranteeing admission to the top 9% of students in each California high school — a model similar to one in Texas credited with improving racial diversity. However, UC reported the plan did little to boost diversity at Berkeley and UCLA, where competition remains intense. Today, Hispanic students make up 20% of undergraduates at those campuses, compared with 53% of California’s high school graduates, while Black students account for just 4% of Berkeley’s student body.
After Michigan voters outlawed affirmative action in 2006, the University of Michigan prioritized recruiting low-income students, sending graduates to serve as counselors in under-resourced schools, offering college prep programs in Detroit and Grand Rapids, and providing full scholarships for low-income residents. The university also reduced early admission offers, which tend to favor white applicants.
Despite these measures, Black and Hispanic enrollment at the University of Michigan has yet to recover to pre-2006 levels. Hispanic numbers have climbed, but Black enrollment has continued to fall — from 8% of undergraduates in 2006 to 4% in 2025.
