On March 11, 2026, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, and Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown co-led a coalition of 17 attorneys general in challenging the Trump Administration’s burdensome new requirements that colleges and universities submit data linking race to admissions, financial aid, and student performance.   

Since 1964, the Department of Education has used the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) to collect basic statistical information from colleges and universities. In August of 2026, the Trump administration issued a memo stating that IPEDS would now become a tool to track “consideration of race in higher education” and investigate universities’ compliance with Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.    

On December 18, 2025, following a notice and comment period in which members of the coalition provided comments strongly opposing the new rules, the Trump administration finalized the new requirements. This entirely new survey requires post-secondary schools to report detailed admissions data, purportedly to ensure colleges are not engaging in unlawful “affirmative action” admissions practices. Under the requirements, colleges and universities must collect and report extensive admissions and student data broken down by race and gender, including test scores, grade point averages, family income ranges, financial aid information, and graduation outcomes. It requires colleges and universities to submit up to seven years of historical data, even though schools have never been asked to track these metrics. The administration has contended that the new survey data will be used to root out so-called unlawful DEI initiatives in higher education, which the administration claims have “been used as a pretext to advance overt and insidious racial discrimination.” The deadline for institutions to provide the new data is March 18, 2026.   

The coalition argues that the Department of Education’s rushed implementation of the new data requirements ignores the incredible burden they place on institutions and dramatically increases the possibility of inadvertent reporting errors and unreliable data. They also argue that the new data demands jeopardize student privacy and could lead to individuals being easily identified. Many institutions have data protection obligations to their students, which are placed at risk by the Administration’s new IPEDS demands.    

The coalition asserts that the administration’s actions are contrary to law, fail to observe the procedure required by law, and are arbitrary and capricious. The attorneys general are asking the court to block the federal government from requiring colleges and universities to complete the survey or penalizing institutions that do not comply. On March 13, the judge extended the deadline for compliance to March 25 to allow for a hearing to take place.  

On March 16, 2026, the court granted a temporary restraining order blocking the implementation of the Trump administration’s new survey requirements. On April 3, 2026, the court issued a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking the Education Department’s demand for extensive admissions data from public colleges and universities. 

This Administration’s unlawful and haphazard actions are threatening the wellbeing of Massachusetts students and the prosperity of our colleges and universities. There is no way for institutions to reasonably deliver accurate data in the federal government’s rushed and arbitrary timeframe, and it is unfair for schools to be threatened with fines, potential losses of funding, and baseless investigations should they not fulfill the Administration’s request. Attorney General Andrea Campbell

The Trump Administration is on a fishing expedition — demanding unprecedented amounts of data from our colleges and universities under the guise of enforcing civil rights law. This is the same administration, I’ll remind you, that gutted the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, leaving thousands of civil rights complaints and investigations in limbo. This latest sham demand threatens to turn a reliable tool into a partisan bludgeon. California is committed to following the law — and we’re going to court to make sure the Trump Administration does the same.Attorney General Rob Bonta

This mandate puts Maryland’s colleges and universities in an impossible position — face the threat of federal penalties, or comply with vague, rushed rules, and risk exposing sensitive student data to a federal government that has already shown it will weaponize that information. We are going to court to protect Maryland students’ personal information and stand with Maryland colleges and universities in resisting these unreasonable and unlawful reporting requirements.    Attorney General Anthony Brown