Commentary

Trump Puts University Admissions Data Under the Microscope

  • By Do No Harm Staff
  • August 7, 2025

Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

To ensure institutions of higher education are not racially discriminating in the admissions process, President Trump is set to order them to hand over their admissions data, according to a recent report from The Daily Caller.

This is much-needed oversight and an important step toward ensuring that institutions of higher education are complying with federal law.

As revealed in the latest installment in Do No Harm’s “Skirting SCOTUS” series, there is substantial evidence that medical schools are discriminating on the basis of race in the admissions process. This behavior has gone on despite the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which ruled that race-conscious admissions violate the constitution.

However, Skirting SCOTUS Part III used public records requests to obtain admissions data that showed startling racial disparities between the test scores and GPAs of Asian and white applicants compared to black applicants. 

Do No Harm submitted public records requests to 93 public medical schools for their 2024 admissions data; however, only 23 provided the requested data.

Those schools’ admissions data showed that accepted Asian and white applicants had higher MCAT scores than accepted black applicants at all but one school, while at 13 schools, the average MCAT score of rejected Asian or white applicants was higher than that of accepted black applicants.

Two schools had particularly egregious disparities: At the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, a black applicant had nearly 10 times the odds of admission compared to an Asian or white applicant with the same MCAT score and GPA.

And at Eastern Virginia Medical School, there was an eleven-fold increase in odds of acceptance for black applicants compared to GPA- and MCAT-equivalent Asian or white applicants.

This order will shine a light on medical schools’ admissions practices and potentially reveal any evidence of unlawful behavior.