The Education Department has opened investigations into 51 colleges and universities for “race-exclusionary practices,” most of them for “partnering” with an organization that provides support to doctoral students but limits eligibility based on race. This is a welcome sign that the Trump administration intends to enforce Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023).
Harder to police will be the admissions process, in which the Supreme Court for 45 years winked at the use of race as a “plus factor” for applicants who belonged to favored minorities. What a plus factor it turned out to be. Discovery in Fair Admissions revealed that black students in the fourth-lowest academic decile had a better chance of admission than Asian students in the top 10%. The case offered a rare peek into the role of race in college admissions, but it shouldn’t take years of litigation to learn this information. And there’s something the administration can do to see that it doesn’t: require colleges and universities to report the average standardized test scores and grade-point averages of admitted and enrolled students by race.
Both Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Higher Education Act of 1965 authorize the Education Department to require schools that receive federal funding to submit information ensuring that they do not discriminate on the basis of race. In Grove City College v. Bell (1984), the high court held that a school’s refusal “to execute a proper program-specific Assurance of Compliance warrants termination of federal assistance to the student financial aid program.” The Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987 expanded Title VI’s nondiscrimination requirement to all of a school’s operations, not only specific programs or activities that receive federal funding.
Schools already report detailed information to the federal government annually through the Education Department’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, including average SAT scores for enrolled students and the racial composition of their student bodies. This reporting is undoubtedly burdensome, but the Supreme Court said in Grove City that “Congress is free to attach reasonable and unambiguous conditions to federal financial assistance that educational institutions are not obligated to accept.” Grove City and Hillsdale colleges—which both have strong antidiscrimination policies—decided to reject federal funding rather than surrender their independence. But most schools concluded that billions of federal dollars are worth the red tape.
The Education Department doesn’t require schools to report average standardized test scores or GPA by race, but it should. That would help enforce compliance with Fair Admissions. If the department systematically collected this information, it would be easier to identify which schools are still engaging in race-based admissions. A significant racial discrepancy in standardized test scores or GPAs of admitted or enrolled students would be an obvious red flag, for further investigation.
Who could be against the truth on SAT scores.
