United States President Donald Trump is preparing to sign an order that would require universities to disclose to the federal government data about their student admissions.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed the news in a post on the social media platform X, reposting an article from the right-wing publication The Daily Caller.

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Trump has long sought to exert greater control over the country’s higher education system, which he and other prominent Republicans consider ideologically skewed.

At the same time, Trump has also sought to dismantle initiatives to promote diversity, equity and inclusion — goals known collectively by the acronym DEI — on the basis that such efforts are inherently discriminatory.

Rolling back DEI

This was such a priority for Trump that, on January 20, during the first day of his second term, he signed an executive order titled “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing”.

That order repealed a previous directive, issued under President Joe Biden, to advance “racial equity” and better support “underserved communities”.

It also called diversity initiatives “illegal and immoral” and ordered the termination of any such programmes run by the federal government.

“Federal employment practices, including Federal employee performance reviews, shall reward individual initiative, skills, performance, and hard work and shall not under any circumstances consider DEI,” the order explained.

Trump has sought to extend his campaign against DEI beyond the auspices of the federal government, including to private enterprises.

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In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s inauguration, major US companies like the retailer Target and the carmaker Ford have reframed or dialled back their DEI programming, in an apparent response to the president’s platform.

But critics have questioned whether Trump may be exceeding his constitutionally mandated powers.

Some have argued that an embrace of diversity practices falls well within a private enterprise’s free speech rights under the First Amendment of the Constitution.

They also point out that, without proactively supporting diversity in companies and universities, those institutions are likely to maintain imbalances in race, gender and ability that do not reflect the wider public.

That, in turn, keeps certain groups out of positions of power, perpetuating a history of segregation and bias in the US.

Peeling back affirmative action

But Trump and his allies have long argued that diversity-promoting practices use race, gender and other factors to discriminate against qualified candidates who may belong to over-represented groups.

In a subsequent executive order on January 21, Trump pledged to restore “merit-based opportunity” in the US.

“Hardworking Americans who deserve a shot at the American Dream should not be stigmatized, demeaned, or shut out of opportunities because of their race or sex,” the executive order said.

Under Trump, the Department of Education has taken steps to roll back diversity initiatives and other “divisive ideology” in schools, including by freezing federal funds to institutions that do not comply.

That has put it at loggerheads with academic freedom advocates, who fear the independence of US schools is being trampled in favour of advancing a political agenda.

Opponents of diversity initiatives, however, have won significant victories, most recently in 2023.

That year, the US Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action — the practice of considering race and other diversity factors in school admissions — violated the US Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, which asserts the right to equal protection under the law.

That decision, delivered by the court’s conservative supermajority, overturned decades of precedent and barred schools from using race as a factor for choosing students.

Some conservative groups, however, have continued to question whether there is a bias in school admissions against white, male and Asian students.

Trump versus the Ivy League

The US president has been among the sceptics clamouring for more information about university admissions and hiring practices, and he has made that demand a pillar in his fights with various top schools.

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Trump has yanked billions in federal contracts, grants and other funds from schools, including Columbia University in New York, Harvard University in Massachusetts and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), which reported this week a pause on $584m in grants.

To restore those suspended funds, Trump has called on university leaders to agree to his demands, including oversight over admissions.

Columbia was the first major campus to do so. As part of its deal with the Trump administration, Columbia agreed to review its admissions practices and establish an advisory group to “analyze recent trends in enrollment”.

The advisory group will then “report to the President”, according to the deal.

The Trump administration has also launched federal investigations into universities, alleging violations of civil rights law. Some universities have submitted to Trump’s demands in part to bring those probes to a close.

On July 30, for instance, another Ivy League school, Brown University in Rhode Island, announced it had struck a deal in exchange for the continuation of its federal funding and a “permanent closure” to the “open reviews and investigations” the Trump administration had launched.

As part of the deal, however, Brown agreed to spend $50m on workforce development programmes and maintain “merit-based admissions policies”.

“No proxy for racial admission will be tolerated,” the deal reads. “Brown may not use personal statements, diversity narratives, or any applicant reference to racial identity as a means to introduce or justify discrimination.”

Still, some schools have resisted Trump’s demands, most notably Harvard, the nation’s oldest university.

In April, Harvard President Alan Garber rejected an agreement proposed by the Trump administration, which would have required a “comprehensive audit” of the school’s hiring and admissions practices.

That data would have then been shared with the federal government.

“No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Garber wrote at the time.