Since taking office, President Donald Trump has attacked colleges and universities using such a bewildering range of tools—civil-rights investigations, research-funding recissions, student-loan cuts, visa bans—that it’s hard to keep track of what the White House is trying to reform or destroy. But the new higher-education compact offered to universities by the administration strongly suggests that Trump’s higher-education agenda, if successful, will result in a far less diverse academy, with fewer Black and Latino students. It will do this by demanding that colleges adopt an admissions system based purely on test scores and GPA—and accusing any institution that resists of illegal racial preferences.
Trump’s fixation on the racial makeup of selective colleges was evident during his first t