Today, Explained - What Trump really wants from colleges

Episode Date: August 12, 2025

It’s not just about the money. This episode was produced by Gabrielle Berbey, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Noel King. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Harvard students rally in favor of affirmative action. Photo by Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Let me take you back to June of 2023. Good morning. We're coming on the air because the Supreme Court has just released a major decision concerning one of the most defining cases brought before the justices this term. The Supreme Court today struck down race-conscious admissions policies, often called affirmative action at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. 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 sense. skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice. 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, Explain from Fox. Is AI coming for your job? Short answer? Maybe. This week on Net Worth and Chill, I'm sitting down with Lucy Guo, the co-founder of Scale AI, founder of passes, and the youngest self-made billionaire woman in America. Lucy has become one of Tech's youngest female founders to hit it big. We're talking nine-figure exit big. And she's dropping all the gems on this episode from her personal entrepreneurship philosophy to how the AI industry is shaping the world.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com slash your rich BFF. Here. Anderson. Here. Today. It's blamed. He's sick. 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? So colleges will now have to report data disaggregated by race and gender. 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, right? 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. 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. 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 is called

quantitative measures of applicants, admitted students and enrolled students, academic 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 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 in rolling. 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? I think it's possible. I don't have any knowledge of 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? 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? How can somebody they can't add or has very basic skills? How do they get into Harvard? And it's been, I would say, almost obsessive excessively 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. 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. That is exactly right. There is a suspicion, I would say deep suspicion on the part of the government and many conservative activists who scrutinized 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 and, you know, 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. 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? 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, smaller, large in the number of African-American students who are 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.

Private colleges and universities are under no FOIA requirement to explain what they're doing. Now, the University of Louisiana, LSU, the University of Florida, could get a FOIA request and say, tell us, you know, exactly what you're doing in detail. You know, you can't do that at Princeton. You, you know, you can't do that at Rice. 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 states. students that many other elite colleges saw. And so I think from that moment, right, suspicions that were already there became even more intense. 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 world. 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?

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. 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? 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

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? 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? So 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 of 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. 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 out. Support for the program comes from Indeed hiring can feel like shouting into the void. But sometimes shouting into the void can be fun, like that's seen in Garden State or when you visit the Grand Canyon. Anyway, when your listing is just one of thousands all competing for attention, Indeed says they can offer a way to cut through the noise and connect with the right candidate fast. according to data from Indeed sponsored jobs posted directly and Indeed have 45% more applications than non-sponsored jobs. Plus, with Indeed sponsored jobs, there are no monthly subscriptions and no long-term contracts you pay for results.

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Hey, this is Peter Kafka, the host of channels. The show about what happens when tech and media get mashed up. And this week I'm talking to comedy journalist Jesse David Fox about the comedy boom and why it's fueled by a combination of TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, and podcasts. Which, as Jesse reminds us, should rhyme with stories we've heard before. The thing about comedy, because it is the cheapest to produce platform, in my opinion, whenever new technology exists, they're the first ones there. That's this week on channels wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Why don't I'm sorry? Roll some. Rolling. This is today explained. Action! I'm Richard Collenberg, and I am director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute. The Progressive Policy Institute, I would take it to mean that you are a progressive? So it's complicated these days.

I'm left of center. I think of myself more as liberal than progressive. 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. So I've long been a supporter of racial diversity and 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, you know, 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. What was the data that you looked at that led you to believe that it was primarily, you know, wealthy black and Hispanic students that were benefiting from affirmative action?

So 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. And then in the litigation, further evidence came out. So 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 made. many Americans would think of as the most deserving applicants for, you know, special consideration, that is working class students and low-income students. 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? 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 economic affirmative action is also illegal if part of the rationale for the policy is seeking to increase racial diversity. Yeah, what do you make of that?

That was your team once upon a time, right? Well, I think 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, you know, that would be perfectly legal. So there would have 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.

Aren't you surprised by that shift? 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 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 affirmative action program at Boston, 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 U.S. Supreme Court will not go down the path of striking down economic-based preferences. 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? 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 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 SCT 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-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. Yes. Increasingly, that's what it looks like. I mean, as long as the Trump administration was focused on, you know, counting race and deciding who gets ahead, he had the American, you know, the administration had the American public on their side. But Americans are 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. Do you think he cares? 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. Richard Collenberg is the director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute.

Guess where Richard went to college? Gabrielle Burbae produced today's show Amina El Sadi edited. Laura Bullard checks the facts. Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristen's daughter are our engineers. And I'm Noel King. It's today explained.