Court blocks Education Department’s data demands for over 170 more colleges
Dive Brief
Court blocks Education Department’s data demands for over 170 more colleges
The ruling expands an earlier pause on the agency’s collection of extensive race and sex admissions data for public colleges in 17 states.
Published April 27, 2026
Natalie Schwartz
Senior Editor
Share
Copy link
Email
LinkedIn
X/Twitter
Facebook
Print
License
Add us on Google
Listen to the article
4 min
This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.
Dive Brief:
- Scores more colleges won’t have to submit detailed race and sex data on their applicants and enrollees to the U.S. Department of Education while a lawsuit against the agency’s new survey plays out, per a federal court order on Friday.
- U.S. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor granted a preliminary injunction blocking the Education Department from enforcing the deadline for the new survey against members of six higher education associations and six private nonprofit colleges.
- The ruling follows an earlier preliminary injunction barring the department from enforcing the deadline for public colleges in 17 largely Democrat-controlled states. Altogether, the new order covers roughly 178 additional colleges, ranging from the California Institute of Technology to Harvard University.
Dive Insight:
The new survey requires four-year colleges with selective admissions to submit extensive student data broken down by race and sex — including information on the GPA, standardized test scores and family income of college applicants — for both the 2025-26 academic year and the prior six years.
The higher education associations and private colleges won the preliminary injunction even though some of the covered institutions had already submitted the required data.
That includes Columbia, Ohio State and Texas A&M universities. Some colleges, like Harvard, had submitted data for at least some of the years. And still others, such as Saint Augustine’s University, had submitted no data.
The Trump administration argued that the institutions shouldn’t be granted a preliminary injunction because the majority of them had already submitted partial or complete data. However, Saylor disagreed in Friday’s ruling.
Saylor wrote that two factors threatened harm to the institutions: the burden of completing the survey and the “imminent, non-speculative risk of fines” and federal funding loss if the Education Department determined they had submitted inadequate data.
Along with pausing the deadline, Saylor also blocked the Education Department from seeking any civil penalties or bringing other enforcement actions against the institutions for not submitting the data.
The ruling covers the following associations and colleges:
- The Association of American Universities, with 69 U.S. members.
- The Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts, with 58 members.
- The Connecticut Conference of Independent Colleges, with 14 members.
- The Maine Independent Colleges Association, with 11 members.
- The North Carolina Independent Colleges and Universities, with 36 members.
- The Oregon Alliance of Independent Colleges and Universities, with 11 members.
- Barnard College, in New York.
- Bryn Mawr College, in Pennsylvania.
- Middlebury College, in Vermont.
- Sarah Lawrence College, in New York.
- Swarthmore College, in Pennsylvania.
- Vassar College, in New York.
Some members of the AAU were already covered by the preliminary injunction earlier this month blocking the data collection for public colleges in 17 states. In that court order, Saylor wrote that the Education Department likely violated the Administrative Procedure Act due to the “rushed and chaotic” rollout of the new survey.
However, Saylor wrote in both rulings that the Education Department had the authority to collect the data it was seeking. He did not rule on whether the data collection unlawfully risked student privacy in either order.
The Trump administration has said it needs to collect the new data to ensure colleges were complying with the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision against race-conscious admissions. The Education Department did not immediately respond to a request Monday for comment.
Filed Under: Policy & Legal
purchase licensing rights