What Trump really wants from colleges

Summary

Summary of "Today, Explained" Episode: "What Trump Really Wants from Colleges"

Released on August 12, 2025 | Hosts: Sean Rameswaram and Noel King | Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network

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1. Supreme Court's Landmark Decision on Affirmative Action

The episode opens with a retrospective look at June 2023, when the Supreme Court delivered a significant ruling that dismantled race-conscious admissions policies, commonly known as affirmative action, at prestigious institutions like Harvard University and the University of North Carolina.

Noel King [00:12]:
"The Supreme Court today struck down race-conscious admissions policies, often called affirmative action at Harvard and the University of North Carolina."

Richard Kahlenberg [00:19]:
"For too long, many universities have wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual's identity is not challenges bested, skills built or lessons learned, but the color of their skin."

This decision marked a pivotal shift in higher education, challenging the foundational practices that aimed to foster diverse educational environments through racial considerations.

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2. The Trump Administration's Response: A Comprehensive Data Demands

In the wake of the Supreme Court's decision, the Trump administration initiated a sweeping memorandum demanding that all colleges and universities submit detailed data to ensure compliance with the new legal framework.

Noel King [02:27]:
"Last week President Trump signed a memo that makes an ask or makes a demand of colleges and universities. What's the ask?"

Richard Kahlenberg [02:27]:
"Colleges will now have to report data disaggregated by race and gender for three subgroups: all applicants in a given year, all admitted students in a given year, and then the cohort of enrolled students."

The administration's memo aims to scrutinize admissions practices rigorously, asserting that some institutions might be covertly circumventing the Supreme Court's ruling by, for example, requiring applicants to describe personal obstacles as a proxy for racial considerations.

Noel King [02:12]:
"The Trump administration thinks this is a sneaky way of getting around the Supreme Court's ruling and says it's going to require colleges to start submitting data proving that they are not breaking the rules."

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3. Implications for Higher Education: Chilling Effects and Wealth Influence

Legal experts express concerns that the administration's stringent data demands could have unintended consequences for universities. Richard Kahlenberg highlights the potential for the memo to inadvertently bolster the role of wealth in admissions processes.

Richard Kahlenberg [03:16]:
"Colleges will have to include what the government has called quantitative measures of applicants, admitted students, and enrolled students' achievements. And those measures will include standardized test scores, high school grade point averages and other applicant characteristics."

There's apprehension that an overemphasis on quantitative metrics like SAT scores and GPAs—factors closely tied to socioeconomic status—might disadvantage underrepresented and low-income students, thereby exacerbating existing inequalities in higher education access.

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4. Analyzing Enrollment Data Post-Ruling

The discussion delves into the actual impact of the Supreme Court's decision on college admissions. Kahlenberg notes a noticeable decline in the enrollment of African American and Hispanic students at many elite institutions post-ruling, though some private colleges maintained or even slightly increased their numbers.

Richard Kahlenberg [07:39]:
"About a year ago is when we started to see colleges releasing, as they do every year, publishing the enrollment data broken down by race and ethnicity. And this was the first admission cycle to be completed for which the Supreme Court ruling had an effect."

These variances have fueled suspicions, particularly toward institutions that did not experience declines, prompting the administration to question their admissions practices more intensely.

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5. The Debate Over Economic vs. Racial Affirmative Action

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to dissecting the nuanced differences between race-based and economic-based affirmative action. Kahlenberg, representing a more progressive stance, argues for the effectiveness of class-based considerations in fostering both racial and economic diversity without relying explicitly on racial categories.

Richard Kahlenberg [10:28]:
"There's a disconnect... between a rather simplistic setup that the government's proposing here, which is that, hey, you know, what really matters? Grades and test scores. And colleges are saying, like it or not, that's not how we operate."

He warns that the administration's focus on quantifiable metrics could undermine holistic admissions processes that consider a broader range of applicant experiences and backgrounds.

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6. Insights from Eric Hoover: A Shift in Legal Perspectives

The episode features insights from Eric Hoover, a senior writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education, who discusses the controversial stance of left-leaning legal experts who have supported the dismantling of race-based affirmative action.

Eric Hoover [14:40]:
"I've long been a supporter of racial diversity in colleges... But I've been troubled that elite colleges were racially integrated but economically segregated."

Hoover explains that his support shifted towards advocating for economic affirmative action, aiming to benefit disadvantaged students across all racial groups rather than focusing solely on race. This pivot has aligned some progressive voices with conservative critiques of affirmative action, highlighting the complex interplay between race and class in educational equity debates.

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7. The Trump Administration's Broader Agenda and Public Opinion

Kahlenberg expresses skepticism regarding the administration's ultimate objectives, suggesting that a broad opposition to any form of diversity initiatives, regardless of their basis, could be politically untenable.

Richard Kahlenberg [23:27]:
"If Trump says no matter how you achieve this racial diversity, I'm just opposed to racial diversity, he'll have lost the public."

He posits that while transparency in admissions is crucial, the administration's approach might overlook the public's nuanced support for integrated yet non-preferential diversity, potentially alienating a broader electorate.

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8. Future Implications and Closing Thoughts

The episode concludes without definitive answers, emphasizing the ongoing uncertainty surrounding the Trump administration's data demands and their long-term impact on higher education. Kahlenberg underscores the delicate balance between ensuring compliance with legal rulings and maintaining equitable admissions practices that consider both race and socioeconomic status.

Richard Kahlenberg [26:32]:
"I'm quite nervous about how the Trump administration will use the data... Essentially incentivizing colleges to admit even more the students who excel on those two measures."

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Conclusion

This episode of "Today, Explained" offers a comprehensive examination of the Trump administration's efforts to regulate college admissions in the post-Supreme Court affirmative action landscape. Through expert analysis and detailed discussions, listeners gain insight into the potential ramifications for higher education, the evolving dynamics of affirmative action, and the broader societal implications of these policy shifts.

Transcript

[Noel King]

Let me take you back to June of 2023. Good morning.

[Eric Hoover]

We're coming on the air because the.

[Richard Kahlenberg]

Supreme Court has just released a major.

[Eric Hoover]

Decision concerning one of the most defining.

[Richard Kahlenberg]

Cases brought before the justices this term.

[Noel King]

The Supreme Court today struck down race conscious admissions policies, often called affirmative action at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.

[Richard Kahlenberg]

For too long, many universities have wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual's identity is not challenges bested, skills built or lessons learned, but the color of their skin.

[Unknown Speaker]

Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.

[Noel King]

When colleges and universities were told to stop factoring race into admissions, many of them started asking applicants to instead describe obstacles that they'd overcome. The Trump administration thinks this is a sneaky way of getting around the Supreme Court's ruling and says it's going to require colleges to start submitting data proving that they are not breaking the rules. Coming up on today explained from Fox. This episode is brought to you by JCPenney. Yes, JCPenney. And if you've been there recently, you know it's the place to go for jaw dropping looks at brag worthy prices. They've got something special for every style and budget, not to mention rewards and deals that make finding those hidden gems even sweeter. If you already shop JCPenney, you're already in on the secret. But if not, it's time to ask.

[Unknown Speaker]

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[Noel King]

Shop jcpenney.com, yes, JCPenney. Megan Rapinoe here. This week on A Touch More, we are joined by my longtime U.S. women's national teammate, Ally Krieger. We talk about her post retirement plans, the current generation of soccer players, and of course, her boots. Sue and I also get into big WNBA trades and share a new workout of the week, one you can do from your own home. Check out the latest episode of A Touch More wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.

[Unknown Speaker]

Adler here.

[Richard Kahlenberg]

Anderson here.

[Unknown Speaker]

Today explained. Um, he's sick.

[Noel King]

I'm Noel King with Eric Hoover. He's a senior writer with the Chronicle of Higher Education where he covers college. All right, so last week President Trump signed a memo that makes an ask or makes a demand of colleges and universities. What's the ask?

[Richard Kahlenberg]

So colleges will now have to report data disaggreg by race and gender for three subgroups. And those subgroups are all applicants in a given year, all the admitted students in a given year, and then the cohort of enrolled students. In other words, the freshman class that ends up attending each college. President Trump taking aim at higher ed Again Thursday, signing a memorandum ordering all colleges submit data to prove they don't consider race in the admissions process.

[Noel King]

This is a continued pattern of the government probing into universities practices in admissions. Legal experts say the new order could have a chilling effect on universities. And experts say the order could wind up making wealth even more influential in admissions.

[Richard Kahlenberg]

We don't know exactly what data the government is going to be asking colleges for. They haven't spelled that out. All we know is that colleges will have to include what the government has called quantitative measures of applicants, admitted students and enrolled students achievements. And those measures will include standardized test scores, high school grade point averages and other applicant characteristics. We don't know what other applicant characteristics beyond grades and test scores will end up being. That remains to be seen. A clue to what all colleges will be asked to hand over now perhaps lies in the terms of the agreements that Columbia University and Brown University University recently signed with the Trump administration. And what Columbia and Brown have agreed to do already is those institutions are now required for the next three years to turn over to the federal government disaggregated data by race and ethnicity on all applicants who applied, all of those applicants who were admitted, and then all of those admitted students who end up enrolling.

[Noel King]

So is it possible that Columbia and Brown cutting these deals actually emboldens the Trump administration to say, okay, everybody else now has to do it too?

[Richard Kahlenberg]

I think it's possible. I don't have any knowledge of whether, whether things would have gone differently if Columbia and or Brown had dug in. But I do think it's likely though that this pot was already boiling, that this was already something being cooked up. Right. The Trump administration has all year long been kind of giving it to higher ed. Right.

[Unknown Speaker]

These students can't add two and two and they go to Harvard, they want remedial math and they're going to teach remedial math at Harvard. Now wait a minute, so why would they get in?

[Richard Kahlenberg]

How can somebody they can't add or.

[Unknown Speaker]

Has very basic skills, how do they get into Harvard?

[Richard Kahlenberg]

And has been, I would say almost obsessively hunting down details about colleges diversity, equity and inclusion strategies and programs and trying to eradicate those. And so I think some people felt like this was going to be the next shoe to drop, doing something big, broad and bold to peer into the college admissions process and ask colleges to do something that they had never been asked to do before.

[Noel King]

In 2023, the Supreme Court hands down a ruling that basically ends race based affirmative action. The Trump administration with this memo seems to be suggesting we don't believe that you guys, you elite colleges really stopped doing it.

[Richard Kahlenberg]

That is exactly right. There's suspicion, I would say deep suspicion on the part of the government and many conservative activists who scrutinize admissions all the time. Yes. You can no longer consider an applicant's race per se as one of many factors in admissions. Colleges have said, we have stopped doing it to comply with the law. And now you have an administration that it seems to be saying, nope, we're shaking our heads. We don't believe you. We believe that you are secretly, quietly, behind closed doors, trying to get around the impact of that ruling and that you are in some way giving an advantage to underrepresented minority students flouting the Supreme Court decision. We have not seen proof or evidence that colleges are violating the law in that regard. I think it's fair to say that the Trump administration is hunting for that evidence.

[Noel King]

All right, so the Trump administration says, we're looking for evidence that you guys are not playing by the rules as determined by the Supreme Court two years ago. What has actually happened in the past two years? Do we have evidence that fewer black and Hispanic students are being accepted to colleges? And do we see colleges trying in ways to get around this?

[Richard Kahlenberg]

Yeah, well, we just have one year of data that would even begin to help us make sense of the immediate impact of the Supreme Court's ruling on affirmative action. About a year ago is when we started to see colleges releasing, as they do every year, publishing the enrollment data broken down by race and ethnicity. And this was the first admission cycle to be completed for which the Supreme Court ruling had an effect. Right. And you saw among elite, so called elite institutions, the most selective colleges and universities, in many, if not most cases, they saw a decline, Right. A drop, small or large, in the number of African American students who were enrolling and or the number of Hispanic students who were enrolling. But you did not see that at every single institution. Right. There were a handful of private colleges where the numbers of underrepresented minority students held steady or in some cases actually increased slightly. And I think that was a key point. That was a key development. Right. Students for Fair Admissions, which is the group that sued Harvard and the University of North Carolina, which led us up to the Supreme Court ruling. They pounced on a small handful of colleges that had not seen declines in underrepresented minority students.

[Unknown Speaker]

Private colleges and universities are under no FOIA requirement to explain what they're doing now. The University of Louisiana, lsu, University of Florida could get a FOIA request and say, tell us exactly what you're doing in detail. You can't do that at Princeton. You can't do that at Rice.

[Richard Kahlenberg]

And they basically pointed a finger at those institutions and said, aha, you must be doing something illegal to have not seen the same outcomes, the same declines in black and or Hispanic students that many other elite colleges saw. And so I think from that moment. Right. Suspicions that were already there became even more intense.

[Noel King]

There is some real tension in the assumptions that the Trump administration is engaging in here. In particular, the idea that if the numbers of black and Hispanic students didn't go down at a particular college, it means that college must be doing something to get around the rules without considering that maybe a lot of black and Hispanic students applied to these colleges and just had really darn good test scores. Right. How do you see both colleges and the administration trying to square this tension?

[Richard Kahlenberg]

Look, there are plenty of smart people who believe that, hey, you know what? The best way to do college admissions would really be to just look at two factors. A student's performance and score on the SAT or ACT exam for one, and then their high school grades, their high school grade point average for another. But once you have a huge group of applicants who light up the board on both metrics, you have to look at other things. Right. Because you have way too many students to possibly enroll them all who have that going for them. And this is where colleges want the public to understand. And the message often doesn't get through. Hey, we're looking at those. Yes, you've got to bring that to the table in most cases. But beyond that, we're trying to do all kinds of other things in admissions. We're trying to look at other aspects of a student's record, for one. But as a college, we have all these wants and needs that if we're only looking at grades and test scores, there's no way to meet all those needs. Right. I think there's a disconnect there between a rather simplistic setup that the government's proposing here, which is that, hey, you know, what really matters? Grades and test scores. And colleges are saying, like it or not, that's not how we operate.

[Noel King]

What ultimately do you think this means for the amount of power that the Trump administration has over higher education? Like, is this an expansion? Is it maybe less of an expansion than it might at first seem? It's just a bunch of names and numbers and details. What does it all mean?

[Richard Kahlenberg]

We're all trying to figure that out, what it all means. I think One thing is colleges and universities have been told that they have 120 days from the release of this executive memorandum to comply with a long list of data requests. And what do we know about the national center for Education Statistics, the part of the Education Department that oversees the collection and analysis and presentation of all this data? Well, that part of the Education Department got gutted recently. So who's going to take all this data and do whatever it is that is meant to be done with it and then spit it out in a way that the public, that the government can make sense of, however they plan to do that? Right. This is a huge logistical challenge. Just because you put on paper that something must be done within 120 days doesn't mean that that will actually happen or happen on time. I guess the next thing I would say is why this matters, why people should care, even if they don't care about the nitty gritty of how elite colleges work. It's clear that in this executive order, the Trump administration and the Secretary of Education are emphasizing metrics, GPAs and standardized test scores that we know correlate with families wealth. And if you are incentivizing colleges in any way right now to consider these metrics, these two measures, to consider them as being even more important than they were before, you're essentially incentivizing colleges to admit even more the students who excel on those two measures. Does this take us down a road of elite colleges pulling back or rolling back their commitments to enrolling lower income students over time? We don't know, but I think that's a definite fear.

[Noel King]

Eric Hoover of the Chronicle of Higher Education coming up, a lefty lawyer argued for years that race conscious admissions should be overturned. He ended up siding with conservatives in that 2023 Supreme Court case. We're going to ask whether he has any regrets about how things have turned.

[Eric Hoover]

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[Richard Kahlenberg]

The Believability of the World. I think I care a lot about that. Whatever reality you're creating, there's enough of, you know, a grounding in some sort of identifiable reality that you believe it.

[Eric Hoover]

You can watch good one every week at YouTube.com vulture or listen wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop on Thursdays. Have a good one.

[Unknown Speaker]

Roll some rolling.

[Noel King]

This is TODAY Explained Action.

[Unknown Speaker]

I'm Richard Kahlenberg and I am director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute.

[Noel King]

The Progressive Policy Institute. I would take it to mean that you are a progressive.

[Unknown Speaker]

So it's complicated. These days I'm left of center. I think of myself more as liberal than progressive.

[Noel King]

I ask because you testified as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the case. Students for Fair Admission. This is the case that essentially gutted race based affirmative action. It doesn't sound like a progressive or even a left of center position. What was going on? Explain what you were thinking.

[Unknown Speaker]

So I've long been a supporter of racial diversity in colleges. I think that's enormously important. But I've been troubled that elite colleges were racially integrated but economically segregated. And so I think there's a better way of creating racial diversity, a more liberal way, if you will, which is to give economically disadvantaged students of all races, low income and working class students who are black, Hispanic, white or Asian, a leg up in the admissions process in order to create both racial and economic diversity.

[Noel King]

What was the data that you looked at that led you to believe that it was primarily wealthy black and Hispanic students that were benefiting from affirmative action?

[Unknown Speaker]

There had been a number of studies over the years that had come to that conclusion, including from supporters of race based affirmative action that was primarily more privileged black and Hispanic students who benefited from race based affirmative action. Then in the litigation, further evidence came out. At Harvard, 71% of the black and Hispanic students came from the Most socioeconomically privileged 20% of the black and Hispanic population nationally. Now, to be clear, the white and Asian students were even richer. But for the most part, this was not a program that was benefiting kind of who many Americans would think of as the most deserving applicants for special consideration, I.e. working class students and low income students.

[Noel King]

All right, so the Supreme Court in 2023, hands down, this decision that says essentially we're done with race based affirmative action. Was there a difference in how progressives interpreted the Supreme Court ruling and how conservatives interpreted the Supreme Court ruling?

[Unknown Speaker]

I would say there's a difference between how progressives interpreted it and how kind of extreme conservatives interpreted it, because most mainstream conservatives have always said they were opposed to racial preferences, but of course they were for economic affirmative action. But now some on the extreme, including the Trump administration, saying that. That economic affirmative action is also illegal if part of the rationale for the policy is seeking to increase racial diversity.

[Noel King]

Yeah. What do you make of that? That was your team once upon a time, right?

[Unknown Speaker]

Well, I think it's, you know, it's troubling when people shift the goalposts. And it was clear that in a number of the Supreme Court concurring opinions in the case that conservatives said that economic affirmative action made a lot of sense. Justice Gorsuch, for example, said if Harvard got rid of legacy preferences and preferences for faculty and instead gave economic affirmative action, that would be perfectly legal. So there had been a longstanding conservative position in favor of economic affirmative action, and now some extremists are shifting their position and saying they're opposed to any kind of affirmative action, whether race based or economic based.

[Noel King]

Are you surprised by that shift?

[Unknown Speaker]

I don't know that I'm surprised. I'M confident, however, that a majority of the U.S. supreme Court won't go that far. The Supreme Court to some degree looks to public opinion and racial preferences were always unreasonable, unpopular. But economic affirmative action is broadly supported by the public. The Supreme Court has had two cases come before it subsequent to the Students for Fair Admissions versus Harvard decision. One involved a challenge to class based affirmative action at Thomas Jefferson High School in Northern Virginia. And the other involved an attack on a similar class based affair affirmative action program at the Boston exam schools like Boston Latin. And in both cases, the U.S. supreme Court said we're not going to hear those cases over the vehement dissent of a couple of extremely conservative justices. So I think I'm fairly confident that the US Supreme Court will not go down the path of striking down economic based preferences.

[Noel King]

What do you make of this move by the Trump administration to ask colleges for data and as we heard it described earlier in the show, maybe catch colleges secretly doing affirmative action anyway?

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, so I'm of two minds about it. I do think transparency is good in higher education. These institutions are receiving lots of taxpayer money. We want to make sure they're following the law following the Supreme Court ruling which said you can't use race because, you know, we don't know whether institutions are cheating or not and so we don't want institutions to break the law. Having said that, I'm quite nervous about how the Trump administration will use the data because if a college discloses the average SAT scores and grades by race of applicants of those admitted and then those enrolled, one of two things can be going on. One is that the university is cheating and they're using racial preferences and that would be a violation of the law. The other possibility is that they did shift to economic affirmative action, which is perfectly legal. And because black and Hispanic students are disproportionately low income and working class, they will disproportionately benefit from a class based affirmative action program. And so the average SAT score is going to look somewhat lower. And so I'm worried that the Trump administration will go after both race based and class based affirmative action because class.

[Noel King]

Based affirmative action still might mean a college is admitting more black and Hispanic students. And what the Trump administration seems to have the issue with is that fact.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yes, increasingly that's what it looks like. I mean, as long as the Trump administration was focused on counting race and deciding who gets ahead, he had the American, the administration had the American public on their side. But Americans also support the idea of racially integrated student bodies. They just don't like racial preferences as the means for getting there. So if Trump says no matter how you achieve this racial diversity, I'm just opposed to racial diversity, he'll have lost the public. And I don't think he will be consistent with the legal framework under Students for Fair Admissions either.

[Noel King]

Do you think he cares?

[Unknown Speaker]

Well, I think he ought to care if he cares about the future of his political party because under class based affirmative action, it is true that black and Hispanic students will disproportionately benefit, but it will also benefit white working class students. And those are the students who are coming from families that form the base of the Republican Party. So I think it would be a big mistake if the Trump administration were to really push hard on that angle.

[Noel King]

Richard Kahlenberg is the director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute. Guess where Richard went to college. Gabrielle Burbet produced Today Show. Amina El Saadi edited Laura Bullard checks the Facts. Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christon's daughter are our engineers. And I'm Noel King. It's TODAY Explained.