How Colleges Pick Students Is Under Federal Fire
Plus, Columbia closes the Ivy testing gap, global rankings are out and a cyberattack is hitting campus HR systems across the country.
In May, the Department of Justice sent letters to the medical schools at Yale University and UCLA alleging illegal discrimination against white and Asian American applicants. The evidence cited? Differences in median test scores and GPAs by racial subgroup. No interviews. No review of individual files. Just numbers, stripped of every circumstance that might explain them.
That’s the approach — and a piece last week in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Eric Hoover makes clear it isn’t going away. The federal government is preparing to release data from the Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement, or ACTS — a sweeping survey the Trump administration created to collect seven years of admissions and demographic information from approximately 2,000 selective four-year institutions. When that data drops, the DOJ’s Yale and UCLA letters will look like a preview.
“I don’t know of any institution that’s been consciously violating the law to preference race in admissions. But this administration has an investment in the narrative that it’s happening, independent of any facts to support it.”
— Jon Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education.
The target is holistic review: the individualized consideration of factors beyond grades and test scores that has defined selective admissions for decades. The administration’s working definition of merit, as Hoover reports, appears to encompass exactly two things — GPAs and standardized test scores — as if every applicant with a 3.7 arrived at that number the same way, from the same school, with the same opportunities.
The practical stakes for families are real. Colleges under this kind of scrutiny are being advised to document and defend their admissions processes with far more precision than before. That means the criteria they use, the factors they weigh and the reasoning behind individual decisions. Some enrollment leaders are calling for institutions to band together and release their own data proactively — to get ahead of the ACTS rollout rather than respond to it.
For students in the process right now, the landscape is unsettled in ways that matter. Holistic review isn’t going anywhere — courts haven’t struck it down, and colleges with far more qualified applicants than seats have no other workable system. But the political pressure on how institutions talk about, document and defend their processes is intensifying. Families should expect more transparency from schools they’re considering, and should know that a student’s full profile — not just their scores — still matters, and still counts.
Rapid Recap
📝🎓 Columbia Is Now the Last Ivy to Bring Back Test Requirements — Columbia announced it will require standardized test scores for undergraduate applicants beginning August 2027, making it the final Ivy League school to reinstate requirements that most universities dropped in 2020.
🏆🌍 UC Berkeley Holds Its Title as the Top Public University in the U.S. — U.S. News & World Report ranked UC Berkeley No. 7 globally and No. 1 among U.S. public universities — a distinction it has held every year since the Best Global Universities list launched in 2014.
🎓💼 Schools Aren’t Preparing Students for Careers, Report Says — A new FutureEd report finds K-12 schools have leaned too hard on “college for all,” leaving students without a realistic sense of what comes next. With 372 students per counselor nationally, the guidance gap is structural.
💻🔓 Canvas Hackers Target Dozens More Colleges — ShinyHunters may have accessed Oracle PeopleSoft — which manages HR and financial data — at more than 100 organizations between May 27 and June 9; roughly 68% are colleges or universities.
What This Means
Campus cyberattacks are no longer an IT department problem — they’re a family problem. HR and financial data means student records, tuition payments and personal information. If your student is enrolled at a selective institution, it’s worth checking whether their school has issued any breach notifications and confirming that login credentials for student portals have been updated.
The Class of 2026 Knows Exactly What It Wants. Do Colleges?
A new survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers of more than 17,000 students across 258 institutions finds the class of 2026 isn’t just looking for a paycheck, they want professional development, job security and a clear path forward.
They’re also clear-eyed about the market. About one in five employed graduates feel overqualified for their current role, and a similar number said they deliberately applied for positions beneath their skill level just to get a foot in the door. More than half described their current job as a stepping stone.
The data points to a generation entering the workforce with high expectations and real self-awareness — but landing in a system that hasn’t caught up. “Career growth is especially important to new college graduates, which means employers need to show clear pathways for advancement, provide meaningful support, and help early talent see how they can build a future within the organization,” said NACE President and CEO Shawn VanDerziel.
For families, the takeaway is worth sitting with. Students who enter college without a framework for what comes next are more likely to graduate into exactly this scenario — capable, credentialed and underplaced. Career planning isn’t a senior-year conversation. The students who fare best start connecting their interests, skills and goals long before they’re writing cover letters.