Case Particulars

Tribunal

Department of Education

Date Filed

October 13, 2025

Docket No.

ED-2025-SCC-0382

Case Status

Comment submitted.

Case Overview

The Equal Protection Project (EPP) submitted a comment to the United States Department of Education concerning a newly proposed rule that could help tamp down on continuing efforts to introduce DEI programs on college campuses.

The Department of Education asked for public input on a newly proposed rule designed to reduce DEI programs in higher education. In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled in Students for Fair Admissions that discrimination based on race in admissions violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Nevertheless, unlawful practices persist because DEI continues to be used as a pretext to advance racial discrimination. Now the colleges are just doing a better job of keeping it hidden.

The federal government does not currently collect data on admissions and scholarships and has limited tools to ensure compliance with Title VI. Therefore, the new rule proposes to add new data categories to already existing college surveys collected by the Department to assess whether colleges are admitting students based on their merit or based on the color of their skin or sex.

EPP offered the Department two additional considerations for how the final rule should work, based on our experience and expertise.

First, in our work investigating and filing civil rights complaints with the Department, EPP has identified several ways, based on a manipulation of language, that educational institutions attempt to evade scrutiny for race-based programs. For example, in a 2024 report titled “How Higher Ed is Rebranding DEI Departments,” one of EPP’s partner projects, CriticalRace.org, documented campus efforts to hide their DEI efforts through rebranding and other tactics.

Second, while open-access institutions, like community colleges, have minimal or no risk for civil rights noncompliance in admissions because they admit all (or the vast majority of) students who apply, these institutions still present a risk of noncompliance in awarding scholarships and other benefits. For example, on September 18, 2025, EPP filed a civil rights complaint with your Department’s Office for Civil Rights against Craven Community College “for discrimination in five (5) scholarships and programs based on race, color, or national origin, in violation of Title VI, and based on sex, in violation of Title IX.” The complaint uses Craven’s own websites to demonstrate the discriminatory nature of the programs.

Based on these examples, EPP asked the Department to include additional objective characteristics in the proposed survey to identify institutions that have a high risk of noncompliance with Title VI through DEI rebranding efforts, and to expand the scope of institutions required to complete the survey to include open-enrollment institutions, which are at risk of noncompliance with respect to scholarship awarding practices.

The Department of Education should take our advice.