Since taking office, President Donald Trump has attacked colleges and universities using such a bewildering range of tools—civil-rights investigations, research-funding recissions, student-loan cuts, visa bans—that it’s hard to keep track of what the White House is trying to reform or destroy. But the new higher-education compact offered to universities by the administration strongly suggests that Trump’s higher-education agenda, if successful, will result in a far less diverse academy, with fewer Black and Latino students. It will do this by demanding that colleges adopt an admissions system based purely on test scores and GPA—and accusing any institution that resists of illegal racial preferences.

Trump’s fixation on the racial makeup of selective colleges was evident during his first term, when the Justice Department sued Yale for racial bias. To back its claim, the DOJ included a table comparing Yale’s admissions rate for students of different races and ethnicities with an “Academic Index,” a measure that combines high-school grades and SAT or ACT scores. The admissions rates weren’t identical: 35 percent of Hispanic students in the top decile of the Academic Index were admitted, for example, compared with 20 percent of white students. The government argued that this showed “significant discrimination on the ground of race.”

The Biden administration withdrew the lawsuit, which seemingly became moot in 2023, when the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.