Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul joined a coalition alongside 17 other states in a lawsuit to stop the Department of Education from requiring universities to share admissions data on race or gender, according to WisPolitics. 

The lawsuit challenges the Trump administration’s demand that higher education institutions must provide new data in the Integrated Postsecondary Education System, according to WisPolitics. 

The IPEDS data system is administered through the Department of Education. IPEDS is a mandatory survey that gathers data from colleges, universities, and technical and vocational programs participating in federal student financial programs, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. 

Trump stated in the August 2025 Presidential Memorandum that the data would use IPEDS as a tool to track “consideration of race in higher education admissions” and monitor university compliance, according to the lawsuit. 

Following the memo, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon stated that the institutions of higher education have to report data disaggregated by race and sex relating to applicant pool, admitted cohort and enrolled cohort at the undergraduate level and for specific graduate and professional programs, according to the lawsuit. 

The memo claimed that the lack of available data paired with the rampant use of university-wide diversity statements and other overt racial proxies continues to raise concerns about whether race is actually used in practice, according to the lawsuit.

 University of Wisconsin assistant professor of educational policy studies Taylor Odle said the memorandum would create new information requests for IPEDS. 

“[Colleges] don’t currently provide information about the applicants themselves except on gender, so there’s not currently a breakdown by race and ethnicity or socioeconomic status,” Odle said. 

The IPEDS data tracking is looking to implement a ruling from the 2023 landmark Supreme Court case, Students for Fair Admissions Practices, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College. 

The case established that Harvard’s race-based admissions systems fail to meet the strict scrutiny, non-stereotyping, and termination criteria, according to SSFA v. Harvard. 

The ruling stated universities could not demonstrate their compelling interests in a measurable way, failed to avoid racial stereotypes, and did not offer a logical endpoint for when race-based admissions would end. Harvard’s race-based admissions programs violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, according to SSFA v. Harvard.

But, the Court noted that nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as the discussion is tied to a quality of character or unique trait that the particular applicant can contribute to the university, according to SSFA v. Harvard.

The 2026 lawsuit argued that the rushed implementation of data requests will result in unreliable data analysis that could lead to costly penalties and baseless investigations into the DOE’s practices, according to Wis Politics. 

The DOE said it will use the data to check compliance with the SSFA v. Harvard ruling, but it remains unclear how the department will understand compliance with the ruling while reviewing the race, ethnicity, gender or socioeconomic status of applicants, Odle said. 

“There seems to be a disconnect between what these data points tell us about applicants themselves and the process that is outlined in law that is related to how they are admitted,” Odle said.

The lawsuit additionally expressed the DOE’s failure to comply with the Administrative Procedures Act due to rushed implementation, according to Odle.  

The coalition argues that the implementation is an unfair and rushed version of data collection, Odle said. 

“This request for additional data is very outside the process for the current data collection, which takes place in IEPDS, which is already a very lengthy process for colleges to provide that data and for the data to be verified,” Odle said. 

The states argued in the lawsuit that the DOE failed to follow correct rulemaking procedures required by the APA when establishing the new requirement of data collection in a small time frame. 

The coalition also expressed that the data would jeopardize student privacy by requesting in-depth information about individual students. Kaul stated that the new data requirements do not consider student privacy nor the importance of receiving reliable data, according to WisPolitics. 

“This additional data request, and especially to ask for data that wasn’t being collected anyways back five or six years, for colleges to go back and report on, that could be particularly complicated.” Odle said. 

Universities will face a variety of challenges when it comes to the diversity of admissions processes and the conclusions drawn from the new data collection, Odle said. 

“We as colleges want people from inside and outside the country, and we want similar mixes of men and women and high income and low income students,” Odle said. “When colleges have one less data point available to them to help make those decisions, then the class becomes one that doesn’t necessarily reflect the growing population, but just reflects those who actually applied to that institution.”

The SSFA v. Harvard decision and the memorandum can cause universities to change how they evaluate applications within the letter of the law, Odle said. 

Data collection remains important for IPEDS, but the new requirement doesn’t give a clear enough picture of admissions, Odle said. Diversity in admissions reaches a greater scope than simply race or gender, Odle said. 

“We definitely want to know what’s going on at colleges and universities, and the government has a right to request that info,” Odle said. “But if the law relates to the process, then you need data about the process, not just the beginning point and the end point.”