WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s efforts to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs have led to investigations into over 50 universities for suspected racial discrimination. Officials argue that these programs marginalize white and Asian American students.
On Friday, the Education Department disclosed these new investigations, following a memorandum issued a month earlier. The memo cautioned educational institutions about the potential loss of federal funding due to “race-based preferences” in various areas such as admissions, scholarships, and student life.
“It is essential to evaluate students based on their merits and achievements, rather than preconceptions based on their racial background,” stated Education Secretary Linda McMahon. She affirmed the Department’s unwavering commitment to this principle.
Most of the new inquiries are focused on colleges’ partnerships with the PhD Project, a nonprofit that helps students from underrepresented groups get degrees in business with the goal of diversifying the business world.
Department officials said that the group limits eligibility based on race and that colleges that partner with it are “engaging in race-exclusionary practices in their graduate programs.”
The group of 45 colleges facing scrutiny over ties to the PhD Project include major public universities such as Arizona State, Ohio State and Rutgers, along with prestigious private schools like Yale, Cornell, Duke and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A message sent to the PhD Project was not immediately returned.
Six other colleges are being investigated for awarding “impermissible race-based scholarships,” the department said, and another is accused of running a program that segregates students on the basis of race.
Those seven are: Grand Valley State University, Ithaca College, the New England College of Optometry, the University of Alabama, the University of Minnesota, the University of South Florida and the University of Tulsa School of Medicine.
The department did not say which of the seven was being investigated for allegations of segregation.
The Feb. 14 memo from Trump’s Republican administration was a sweeping expansion of a 2023 Supreme Court decision that barred colleges from using race as a factor in admissions.
That decision focused on admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, but the Education Department said it will interpret the decision to forbid race-based policies in any aspect of education, both in K-12 schools and higher education.
In the memo, Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights, had said schools’ and colleges’ diversity, equity and inclusion efforts have been “smuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race-consciousness into everyday training, programming and discipline.
The memo is being challenged in federal lawsuits from the nation’s two largest teachers’ unions. The suits say the memo is too vague and violates the free speech rights of educators.
Copyright © 2025 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
