After President Donald Trump signed a presidential memoranda last month to revamp and expand the Department of Education’s data collection system, higher education experts said the new data could be “weaponized” to punish GW for pursuing diversity goals this academic year.
Trump issued an executive action on Aug. 7 directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “revise” the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System — a Department of Education data collection system — by expanding the requirements universities are mandated to report. Experts in higher education said the executive action could lead to the Trump administration threatening to withhold federal funding from schools the administration deems are still encouraging the consideration of students’ race in college admissions after the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional.
University spokesperson Julia Garbitt said the University is evaluating the executive action to understand its potential implications on students and higher education. She said officials remain committed to supporting prospective students and providing them with equal opportunities to succeed at the University while also complying with all federal regulations.
McMahon has until Dec. 5 to coordinate with the National Center for Education Statistics to expand the scope of required reporting, which the memo said will be initiated this academic year. McMahon in a memo on Aug. 7 — the same day of Trump’s memo — said the Department of Education will collect data “disaggregated” by race and sex from applicants, admitted students and enrolled students at the undergraduate level and for specific graduate and professional programs.
IPEDS currently collects data annually on GW’s general institutional history, admission and test scores, cost of attendance, student financial aid and average net price. It also collects data on GW’s enrollment, degrees and certificate completion rates, retention and graduation rates, award and enrollment rates, revenue, number of staff and graduate assistants and the materials in the library’s collection and its expenses.
McMahon said in the memo the data collection will be expanded for enrolled students to include data from each “race-and-sex pair’s” graduation rates, final GPAs, financial aid offered and financial aid provided.
The memo also directs McMahon to take “remedial action” if institutions fail to submit data timely or submit incomplete or inaccurate data — though the exact date they will have to submit the new data by is unclear.
At least four experts said they worry that universities aren’t going to be able to compile the data the federal government will require because the Department of Education is requesting data from five years ago that universities might not have collected. They also said the timeline of the revision of IPEDS is “extraordinarily quick,” leading them to question if the data collection is feasible because of the lack of staff in the Department of Education.
Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, said the Trump administration could threaten to withhold federal financial aid from universities or try to remove college presidents if they feel a school’s data shows they are encouraging affirmative action practices.
Kelchen said the timeline for the data collection this academic year — including a 60-day public comment period within Trump’s 120-day data expansion timeline — is quick for the size of the data collection the Trump administration is requiring from universities. He said this also comes as the Department of Education’s staff got “pretty well torched” by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, and the NCES has approximately three employees due to layoffs.
The public commenting period opened on Aug. 15 — eight days after Trump’s memo — and closes at the end of day on Oct. 14, where anybody interested can submit a public comment regarding the revision of IPEDS’ data collection. As of Sunday, the public has submitted 101 public comments about the executive action, though only 95 are publicly available to view.
Commenters, which range from university officials to anonymous individuals, condemned Trump’s memo, citing the difficulties in collecting data from five years back and the fast turnaround time for collecting the new data. Several commenters called on the Trump administration to delay the collection of data until at least until the 2027-28 collection cycle.
“I think that the big takeaway is just nobody knows quite what to do about this because it is politically fraught,” Kelchen said. “But just from a data perspective, it’s going to be almost impossible to produce high-quality data on a short timeframe that also protects the privacy of students.”
Jeremy Young — the senior adviser of strategic initiatives for the American Association of Colleges & Universities — said Trump has scrutinized institutions who have used their recruitment strategies to focus on bringing in minority students in a post-affirmative action world, which could result in GW changing the ways in which it recruits students or the populations of students they are trying to appeal to.
Garbitt declined to comment on if officials anticipate changes in outreach, recruitment or selection practices as a result of Trump’s executive action.
“There’s a lot of scrutiny on the question of whether selective institutions are using their recruitment strategies to sort of try to focus on bringing in minority students or students from certain areas,” Young said.
Young said the Trump administration has interpreted the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling as it illegal for universities to not completely ignore race or identity in college admissions under the Civil Rights Act. He said the ruling rather says that colleges are able to take into consideration information relating to diversity or identity if a student voluntarily discloses it.
“The people who are criticizing colleges’ admissions practices are now going to be essentially demanding the colleges admit the exact percentage of each minority group that they think they should admit,” Young said.
McMahon in a memorandum to NCES’s Acting Commissioner Matthew Soldner on Aug. 7 said the new admissions data collected should capture information that could indicate whether or not universities are using “race-based preferencing” in their admissions process.
Vice Provost for Enrollment and Student Success Jay Goff said in December the University met all its enrollment targets for the 2024 admissions cycle despite the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling that bans race-conscious admission policies. He said the proportion of admitted underrepresented minorities rose and made up 25.7 percent of the Class of 2028, compared to 22 percent of the Class of 2027, when officials were permitted to factor race into their admission considerations.
Officials in December 2023 said admissions officers will continue to emphasize “resilience” to boost admitted students’ diversity after the Supreme Court banned affirmative action. Experts in college admissions at the time said the “grit” rating was unlikely to significantly diversify admitted student classes like affirmative action would, though it was a step in the right direction.
Bryan Cook, the director for higher education policy at the Urban Institute, said he would caution the Trump administration to think “long and hard” about the timeline because of its atypical turnaround, and people would be more receptive to the IPEDS changes if the proposal went through its normal process that ensures quality of the data.
“Going through this, what feels like a rushed process, just raises the prospect of having data that ultimately will not be high quality or provide the type of comparable insight that I think the administration is ultimately looking for,” Cook said.
Stephanie Cellini, a professor of public policy and public administration at GW who has worked with IPEDS data as a researcher, said the information the government is requesting won’t give a “holistic review” of GW’s admissions practices. She said policymakers may draw “inappropriate conclusions” when looking at particular data elements instead of looking at students’ full application materials, including essays, extracurriculars and teacher recommendations.
“It’s not really clear that the Department of Education really has the capacity to handle this task,” Cellini said. “It’s not entirely clear that it would be done carefully and well.”
