Judge blocks Trump college admissions data mandate for 17 states

President Trump signed a presidential memorandum on August 7, 2025, titled 'Ensuring Transparency in Higher Education Admissions,' directing the Department of Education to collect detailed student-level admissions data from every college that participates in federal financial aid programs, . Education Secretary Linda McMahon ordered the National Center for Education Statistics — the federal agency that runs IPEDS, the primary database for higher education data — to add a new survey called the Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement, or ACTS. ACTS required colleges to submit retroactive, application-level records for each student who applied, was admitted, enrolled, or was rejected, broken down by race, sex, high school GPA, and standardized test scores.

NECS opened the ACTS collection on December 18, 2025, and set a submission deadline in early 2026 — a window of less than five months from the August 2025 memorandum. found that college officials had never collected or stored admissions data in the required format, and the retroactive scope meant tracking down records that many institutions had not preserved in a compatible form.

The Administrative Procedure Act requires federal agencies to publish proposed rules in the Federal Register, accept public comments for at least 30 days, and respond to those comments before a rule takes effect, . The NCES published a request for comment in the Federal Register on August 15, 2025, but the 120-day presidential deadline made it impossible to complete that process before colleges were required to comply. Judge Saylor found that the deadline 'led directly to the failure of NCES to engage meaningfully with the institutions during the notice-and-comment process to address the multitude of problems presented by the new requirements.'

Colleges and higher education associations filed hundreds of comments describing compliance problems that the agency never resolved:

• Many colleges don't store application-level data by race in a retrievable format, requiring reconstruction of years of records
• The retroactive scope demanded data that predated the ACTS rule by multiple admissions cycles
• Sharing individual student-level data with the Education Department's enforcement division raised direct conflicts with FERPA's student privacy protections
• Smaller institutions lacked the technical infrastructure to produce the required data format on any timeline
• The compressed schedule left no time for IT procurement, data governance review, or legal clearance

TMTed Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, submitted comments on behalf of the higher education community calling the timeline 'operationally impossible' and arguing that the administration had substituted presidential deadline pressure for the public deliberation the APA requires.

Attorneys general from 17 Democratic-led states filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of 🏛️Massachusetts in early 2026, arguing ACTS violated the APA's notice-and-comment requirement, imposed an unreasonable compliance burden, and threatened student privacy. 🌴California Attorney General RBRob Bonta led the coalition. Massachusetts AG AJAndrea Joy Campbell — whose state hosts the federal district court hearing the case — and 🗽New York AG LJLetitia James were among the named plaintiffs. that the coalition argued the administration had 'invented an enforcement mechanism with no basis in the Court's actual decision.'

Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV — appointed by President George W. Bush and confirmed in 2004 — granted a preliminary injunction blocking ACTS for the 17 plaintiff states while the case continues. Saylor wrote that the federal government 'likely has the authority' to collect the data but that the process used to impose the mandate was unlawful. The ruling keeps the injunction in place while Saylor weighs whether to convert it into a longer-term preliminary injunction. Colleges in the other 33 states were not covered by the injunction and still faced their original submission deadline, creating a two-tier compliance system.

The Trump administration created ACTS specifically to enforce the Supreme Court's 2023 SFFA v. Harvard ruling, which banned race-conscious college admissions, . Administration officials argued that colleges were continuing to favor certain racial groups through indirect proxies and that ACTS data would let the Department of Education investigate and prosecute violations. McMahon said the data collection was necessary because colleges 'may have found ways around the SFFA ruling.' The administration's enforcement theory held that by analyzing the relationship between applicant race, test scores, and admission outcomes across tens of thousands of applications, the department could detect statistical patterns indicating that race was still influencing decisions.

Chief Justice JRJohn Roberts wrote the requiring colleges to stop using an applicant's race as a direct factor in admissions decisions. Roberts' opinion did not require colleges to prove compliance through data reporting. Critics, including the 17 state AGs, said the demand amounted to a surveillance mandate that inverted the presumption of compliance: rather than requiring the government to produce evidence of a violation before demanding records, ACTS demanded records from every college regardless of whether any violation had occurred.

The FERPA conflict is central to the case. FERPA — the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act — prohibits colleges from disclosing personally identifiable student records to outside parties without student consent, . The 17 states argued that uploading individual student application records, broken down by race and test score, to a federal database accessible to the Education Department's enforcement division violated FERPA's protections. The NCES operates under a statutory data confidentiality provision that limits how its collected data can be used — but the ACTS mandate was designed to feed enforcement actions, not just statistical research.

The legal arguments about FERPA's exceptions broke down along these lines:

• The administration argued that colleges' voluntary participation in federal aid programs requires data reporting and that FERPA's exception for disclosures to state and federal education authorities permitted the collection
• The 17 plaintiff states argued that the enforcement use — targeting individual institutions for civil rights investigations — fell outside the educational authority exception and required student consent
• Civil rights scholars noted that FERPA was designed to prevent precisely this kind of government compilation of individual student records for enforcement purposes
• Judge Saylor did not resolve the FERPA question in his preliminary injunction ruling, focusing instead on the APA notice-and-comment failure — meaning this dispute will continue in the next phase of litigation

The case is likely to continue for months and could reach the First Circuit Court of Appeals regardless of which side prevails at the district court level. The Trump administration could attempt to restart the rulemaking process with proper notice-and-comment procedures — which could take 12 to 18 months under the APA — or could appeal the injunction and seek emergency relief to resume collection. that the 33 states not covered by the injunction must still comply with the original ACTS deadline unless they join the lawsuit or a court expands the injunction nationally.

The outcome will determine whether the executive branch can use data mandates to build a compliance surveillance system for private institutions — and whether a president can set a deadline that forces agencies to skip the public input process required by law. If courts ultimately permit the data collection after a proper rulemaking, they'll face the deeper question of whether FERPA and the SFFA ruling's actual text support the administration's enforcement theory at all.

IPEDS — the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System — has collected institutional data from colleges since 1986 under the Higher Education Act, . Its surveys capture aggregate institutional data: how many students enrolled, what degrees were awarded, financial aid totals, and graduation rates by demographic group. IPEDS data is published at the institutional level and used by researchers, students, and policymakers to compare colleges. Individual student records have never been part of IPEDS collection.

ACTS represented a fundamental shift in scope. Instead of asking 'what percentage of applicants were from each racial group,' ACTS asked colleges to submit a row of data for every individual applicant, including their race, test score, GPA, application outcome, and enrollment decision. This shift from aggregate to individual-level collection is what created the FERPA conflict: aggregate statistics don't identify individual students, but individual-level records can. The precedent ACTS would set — allowing the federal government to demand individual student records from every college with federal aid relationships — has implications far beyond SFFA enforcement, including for future administrations seeking to audit compliance with other federal laws.

The ACTS mandate creates a compliance asymmetry that will outlast the injunction. Students at colleges in the 17 protected states have their application records shielded from federal collection for now. Students at colleges in the 33 unprotected states may have already had their individual application records submitted to the federal government before the injunction was issued. Whether those already-submitted records will be accessible to the Education Department's enforcement division, whether they can be used in civil rights investigations, and whether students have any right to notice that their records were disclosed — these questions are not resolved by the current injunction.

The American Council on Education and NAICU — the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities — have filed amicus briefs arguing for national injunctive relief that would protect all colleges regardless of which state they're in. TMTed Mitchell, ACE president, said in a statement that 'a two-tier compliance system where your privacy rights depend on which state your college is in is not a sustainable legal framework.' The First Circuit Court of Appeals will eventually have to decide whether the injunction should apply nationally.