Trump targets college affirmative action — DOJ, start here
President Donald Trump’s Justice Department has committed to ending affirmative action and DEI in education — but top universities’ scofflaw behavior means that new Attorney General Pam Bondi will have a tough fight on her hands.
In her first day on the job, Bondi announced she will require compliance with Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the 2023 Supreme Court decision that banned affirmative action in college admissions.
“Educational agencies, colleges and universities that receive federal funds may not ‘treat some students worse than others in part because of race,’” Bondi wrote in a memo.
What a welcome change: For almost two years, elite universities have ignored the high court’s ruling and continued to grant race-based preferences to black and Hispanic applicants while penalizing Asians.
And why wouldn’t they? The last administration refused to enforce the law — and even told schools how to evade it.
In one instance, former President Joe Biden advised universities to give “serious consideration to the adversities that students have overcome,” such as “personal experiences of hardship or discrimination, including racial discrimination.”
At least some universities will undoubtedly flout Bondi’s warning and continue using sneaky tactics to keep on using racial preferences in admissions — just like the University of California has allegedly been doing for decades since the Golden State barred it, according to a bombshell lawsuit filed last week.
Which elite universities should the DOJ keep an eye on?
First, Yale. In 2016, a coalition of Asian-American organizations accused the Ivy of discriminating against Asians in undergraduate admissions.
When the Justice Department in the first Trump administration investigated, it found solid evidence for their claim. While an Asian-American applicant in the top academic decile had only a 14.32% chance of gaining admission to Yale, a black applicant in the same decile had a 60% chance.
The DOJ sued Yale in 2020 for this clear violation of Title VI, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race — but Biden dismissed the lawsuit shortly after taking office.
The Supreme Court settled the matter in 2023, but this past September, advocates alleged that Yale was still penalizing Asian-American applicants.
In a letter to the university’s general counsel, Students for Fair Admissions President Edward Blum noted that the Class of 2028, the first group admitted since the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action, was 24% Asian, down 6 percentage points from the Class of 2027. Meanwhile, the share of black students remained stable, and the share of Hispanic students increased.
“Your racial numbers are not possible,” Mr. Blum contended, “under true race-neutrality. You refused to eliminate legacy preferences, and socioeconomic preferences would not cause a decrease in Asian enrollment.”
He lodged similar complaints against Princeton and Duke, all three of which deserve Justice’s close scrutiny.
Also under the microscope should be the 15 universities that argued, in an amicus brief for Harvard in the Fair Admissions case, that they would be unable to maintain racial diversity in the absence of affirmative action.
The group includes some big-name institutions: Columbia, Brown, Cornell, Vanderbilt and more.
Several of these institutions saw virtually no change in racial makeup between the Class of 2027 and Class of 2028; some even saw a decline in the number of Asian-American students.
Did they lie to the Supreme Court in 2023, or are they engaging in unlawful discrimination now?
Finally, the Justice Department must pay attention to universities that have added essay questions on diversity, identity or adversity to their applications in the last two years.
These questions deliberately encourage students to disclose their race and ethnicity — information the universities can then use to circumvent the Fair Admissions ruling.
A University of Chicago researcher discovered that more than two-thirds of the nation’s top 65 universities, including Georgetown and the University of Virginia, included a diversity-, identity- or adversity-related question on their application in 2024 — up from 42% in 2020 and 54% in 2022.
Nearly half of them, 48%, made such a question mandatory in 2024, compared to 31% in 2020 and 35% in 2022.
Congressional Republicans can help the Justice effort, too.
House Republicans on the Education and Workforce Committee, for example, can invite the presidents of Yale, Duke, Princeton and other elite universities to testify about their admissions practices and ask — point-blank and under oath — whether their institutions are still engaging in racial favoritism.
A Supreme Court decision is only as good as the presidential administration responsible for its enforcement.
For the next four years, universities would be wise to follow the law.
Renu Mukherjee is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
