A federal judge has extended the deadline for institutional members of six higher education associations – as well as a group of six independent colleges – to submit detailed applicant and admission data that the U.S. Department of Education is seeking to ensure the schools are not considering race in their admission decisions.
The schools were initially required to submit the data by March 18. The new deadline is April 24, U.S. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor ruled in a temporary restraining order he granted to the plaintiff schools. The temporary restraining order – one of several issued in the case – is meant to give the plaintiff institutions more time to brief the court on the matter while the case is pending.
The case concerns whether the federal government can compel colleges and universities to comply with a 2025 Education Department directive for institutions that receive federal aid to submit detailed data about their applicants and admitted students that is broken down by race and sex.
The bigger picture:
On August 7, 2025, President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order to revamp the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, more commonly known as IPEDS, which is managed by the National Center for Education Statistics. The idea behind the order – titled “Ensuring Transparency in Higher Education Admissions” – is to give the federal government a way to check if institutions of higher education are complying with the Supreme Court’s 2023 ban on the use of race in college admissions.
A directive issued the same day by Education Secretary Linda McMahon spells out the information that colleges and universities are supposed to provide for the revamped IPEDS for the 2025-2026 school year. It includes data broken down by race and sex regarding applicants and admitted students’ test scores, GPAs, first-generation-college-student-status and other characteristics. It also orders the schools to provide information concerning their students’ graduation rates, final GPAs, financial aid offered and financial aid provided, also broken down by race and sex. Colleges and universities that receive federal student aid through Title IV are supposed to provide the information through a survey called the Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement, or ACTS.
On March 11, attorneys general from 17 states filed a lawsuit against the Department of Education, arguing that the new reporting requirements were implemented too hastily, are too onerous, and put student privacy at risk. “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,” Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell said in a statement regarding the lawsuit. Earlier this month, the judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking the rule’s enforcement.
The extension granted by Judge Saylor covers schools belonging to the below-listed higher education groups:
Association of American Universities
Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts
Connecticut Conference of Independent Colleges
Maine Independent Colleges Association
North Carolina Independent Colleges and Universities
Oregon Alliance of Independent Colleges and Universities.
Collectively, those associations have nearly 200 member institutions in the U.S.
The order also covers the following private nonprofit colleges:
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
The judge also allowed the higher education associations and six colleges to join the lawsuit that challenges the Education Department’s new survey.
