Judge blocks Trump demand for data on California college applicants

A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from forcing universities to submit seven years of extensive data for applicants and admitted students — including grade-point averages and test scores — to prove they don’t illegally consider race in admissions.

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.

The judge’s preliminary injunction applies only to public colleges and universities in the states that sued while the case proceeds through litigation.

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.

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’s members include Stanford and USC.

California accuses government of ‘fishing expedition’

The U.S. Department of Education’s new policy, announced in August, widely expanded long-standing federal data collection from universities. It said schools must share the information by March 18.

Saylor twice extended the deadline while he considered arguments from both sides on an injunction.

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 affirmative action policies in 2023.

In that case, justices said colleges could consider how race has shaped students’ lives if they wrote about the theme in admissions essays. In California, Proposition 209 has banned public colleges and universities from considering race in admissions since 1997.

In filing California’s suit against the Trump administration, Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta called the request a “fishing expedition” that was “demanding unprecedented amounts of data from our colleges and universities under the guise of enforcing civil rights law.”

Democratic states argued in their legal complaint that the government was turning the nonpartisan National Center for Education Statistics into a “mechanism for law enforcement and the furthering of partisan policy aims.”

Trump higher education probes

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. UC and UCLA have said they follow federal and California law.

Last week, the Department of Justice said it was also investigating whether medical schools at UC San Diego and Stanford engaged in racial discrimination in admissions. As part of those investigations, the Justice Department demanded the medical schools submit students’ personal and academic data by April 24 or face possible federal funding cuts. The schools said they follow state and federal law in admissions and are reviewing the government’s requests.

The medical school information requested included data about students’ race, Medical College Admission Test scores, undergraduate GPAs, home ZIP Codes, citizenship status, admission essays, and whether they are legacy admits or have family who donated to the schools.

In multiple investigations and legal filings since last year, the Trump administration has broadly argued that colleges and universities are using personal statements and other proxies, such as income levels or ZIP Codes, to illegally consider applicants’ race.

The government’s August 2025 memo at the center of the legal battle directed Education Secretary Linda McMahon to get more information from colleges to “provide adequate transparency into admissions.”

“If data collection is delayed, the public release of admissions statistics will also be delayed, and an entire year of college applicants will be denied fulsome information on their chances securing a coveted spot at their dream schools based on their race, sex, and other characteristics,” government lawyers wrote in a court filing. “These students may spend money on colleges that they have no realistic chance of admission.”

The Justice Department said in court filings that as of March 23, 1,700 colleges and universities had either completed their submissions or qualified for extensions after sending in partial reports.

If colleges do not submit the data, the government can fine them under the Higher Education Act of 1965, which details requirements for colleges that receive federal financial aid for students, such as Pell Grants.