A federal judge in Boston broadened an existing court order Friday, shielding more than 170 additional colleges and universities from having to submit sweeping admissions data to the U.S. Department of Education while litigation over the survey continues.
U.S. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV granted a preliminary injunction blocking the Education Department from enforcing its Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement — known as ACTS — against six higher education associations and six private colleges. The ruling follows an April 3 order in which Saylor had already blocked the survey’s enforcement against public universities in 17 states.
The ACTS survey, created at President Trump’s direction, requires four-year colleges with selective admissions to submit seven years of detailed student data broken down by race, sex, GPA, standardized test scores, and family income. The Trump administration framed the data collection as necessary to ensure compliance with the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which ended race-conscious admissions. Trump had previously cited universities’ “rampant use” of “hidden racial proxies” as justification for the initiative.
Saylor again found the institutions likely to succeed in their argument that the survey’s rollout violated the Administrative Procedure Act. In his April 3 ruling, he described the process as “rushed and chaotic” — language that carried through to Friday’s decision. The judge pointed specifically to the Education Department’s failure to meaningfully engage with concerns about implementing such a large-scale data reporting requirement on an accelerated timeline while simultaneously dismantling the very agency responsible for collecting it.
Trump directed the Education Department to gather the data within 120 days, a deadline that caused the agency to bypass its standard Technical Review Panel process — a collaborative procedure developed over years to ensure data quality, reduce institutional burden, and protect student privacy. The agency acknowledged skipping the process solely because of the presidential deadline.
Complicating matters further, the judge noted that the National Center for Education Statistics, the office within the Department responsible for administering the surveys, is in the process of being shut down as part of broader efforts to dismantle the department. In remarks at an Easter lunch at the White House on April 1, Trump appeared to confirm that the dismantling was already effectively underway, telling attendees that Secretary Linda McMahon had moved education back to the states and adding, “I said don’t worry about [Congressional approval], just do it.”
Friday’s injunction covers members of the Association of American Universities, which includes all eight Ivy League schools and 61 other research universities, along with five regional independent college associations and six private institutions including Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Middlebury, Sarah Lawrence, Swarthmore, and Vassar colleges. Altogether, the order protects roughly 178 institutions beyond those already covered by the April 3 ruling.
The government had argued that many of the schools shouldn’t qualify for relief because a number of them — including Columbia, Ohio State, and Texas A&M — had already submitted partial or complete data. Saylor rejected that argument, noting that even institutions that had submitted data still faced potential fines or loss of federal funding if the department deemed their submissions inadequate. The presidential directive, unlike the underlying statute, gave the secretary no discretion to excuse incomplete or inaccurate submissions.
Saylor declined to issue a nationwide stay that would have extended relief to the more than 2,000 four-year institutions not party to the lawsuit, citing concerns about judicial overreach and separation of powers. The ACTS survey remains in effect for schools not covered by either court order.
