Editor’s note: This is the first story in a collaborative series from the Northwest News Network covering the state of Northwest college admissions in 2025.
It’s a busy time for college-hopeful high school students across the Pacific Northwest.
Students looking to secure a spot ahead of time at their college of choice are scrambling to send in applications quickly as early-decision deadlines hit in early November.
For students, there are few differences in this year’s application process from last year. But the same can’t be said for higher education institutions, which have been under the Trump administration’s intense microscope for the past 10 months.
Among the more recent federal actions is a directive ordering universities to report out additional information about students applying to their schools, including grade point average and test score data organized by race. The federal government says this data is needed to make sure colleges, specifically highly selective schools, are complying with a 2023 Supreme Court decision that ended race-based affirmative action.
But higher education experts say the order is misguided and an administrative burden. More importantly, they say race-neutral admissions won’t have a big impact on how the vast majority of institutions decide which students to admit.
That’s especially true in Oregon and Washington, where the vast majority of colleges and universities are considered open-access institutions. These schools are focused on enrolling, educating and graduating as many students as possible - no matter their race.
Admissions 101
Students looking to study at a college or university in Oregon or Washington are likely to find an open seat waiting for them.
“There’s two kinds of admissions offices in the world: those who deny students they would like to admit and those who admit students they would prefer to deny,” said Jon Boeckenstedt, former enrollment vice provost at Oregon State University and principal of the college admissions consultancy EnrollmentVP.com.
The vast majority of colleges and universities in the Northwest fall into the latter category, following a nationwide trend. Four-year, public and private universities in the U.S. accepted more than 70% of all applicants in 2022, according to an analysis from the National Association for College Admissions Counseling.
That percentage can jump even higher for institutions located in rural areas, like Central Washington University and Southern Oregon University.
“We admit around 90% of our undergraduate applicants,” SOU’s Assistant Vice President of Enrollment Services Zac Olson said. “We’re a state public regional institution here to serve our region. That’s our mission.”
There are a lot of factors to consider in a college application: the personal statement, essays and test scores. But admissions directors who shared information with OPB and other public media stations in the Northwest said the main driver behind getting an acceptance letter is a student’s high school transcript.
“We look at a student’s academic achievement through grades and the rigor of their curriculum and also at the student’s extracurricular activities and their character through a letter of recommendation,” said Nate Mannetter, who leads enrollment at Gonzaga University, a private institution in Spokane. “The most heavily weighted criteria is in the student’s academic achievement.”
However, educational equity gaps are persistent among the nation’s high school students. Data from the National Center for Education Statistics show grade point averages of Black and Hispanic students consistently lag behind white students. Meanwhile, students who identify as Asian have higher than average grade point averages.
Boeckenstedt said it’s legitimate for admissions offices to think about these existing equity gaps in the admissions process.
“When you consider race in America, it can be a contributing factor to academic performance,” Boeckenstedt said. “But it’s never a matter of, ‘this student is Hispanic, so we’re going to admit her.’ That just does not happen in college admissions.”
Accepting as many students as possible is also a wise financial decision for many institutions. Colleges rely on student tuition dollars as a major source of revenue, especially in Oregon where public universities see a much smaller share of state funding put toward higher education compared to other states.
Trump Administration targets selective schools
The admissions memorandum, issued in August, follows the Trump administration’s previous efforts to root out diversity, equity and inclusion policies at colleges and universities. The directive is largely aimed at Ivy League and other institutions where the majority of applicants are not accepted. The federal government believes these highly selective colleges are using “racial proxies and diversity statements” in admissions, skirting the two-year-old nationwide ban on affirmative action.
In the Northwest, you can count the number of selective institutions - those that admit 50% or less of all student applicants - on one hand.
With an acceptance rate of 43%, the Seattle campus of the University of Washington is the state’s most selective college. The public institution generally has a high overall admissions rate but it has much lower acceptance rates for its competitive computer science and engineering programs.
“The UW abides by state and federal law and does not use race as a factor in admissions,” said UW spokesperson Victor Balta in an emailed statement.
UW-Seattle is also the state’s largest school by enrollment, with more than 39,000 undergraduates in 2023, according to NCES.
Officials at UW declined to answer specific questions about how Trump’s admissions order might impact the university. But Washington’s public universities had already been barred from considering race for a quarter century before the Supreme Court decision. Voters in the Evergreen State approved an affirmative action ban in 1998.
Reed College is the most selective higher education institution in the Northwest. The small, private, liberal arts college in Portland had an acceptance rate of 27% in 2023, according to NCES. Its undergraduate student population that same school year was just over 1,400.
A spokesperson with Reed declined to talk about how its application process could change under the Trump directive. But higher education experts say it will most likely have little influence.
“Even for those of us who don’t have the luxury of having a super deep applicant pool, we’ve changed practices to ensure there isn’t a way to be influenced by an applicant’s race or ethnicity. That information is masked,” Lewis & Clark College Vice President for Admissions and Financial Aid Eric Staab said. “I would be totally shocked if the hyper-selective institutions didn’t do exactly the same thing.”
The impact of race-neutral admissions policies
The effects of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision on the enrollment of students of color appear to differ, based on how selective an institution is.
Enrollment figures from last year showed big drops in Black and Hispanic students at some elite schools. This year, schools have been slow to release data but a recent Associated Press analysis revealed that Black student enrollment at several selective colleges is continuing to fall.
But preliminary data coming from public, non-selective schools are telling a different story. The end of race-based admissions at these schools is having very little impact, said Princeton University professor of economics Zachary Bleemer.
“There’s a bunch of schools where nothing happened,” Bleemer said. “Ending affirmative action in Nebraska did not change the number of Black and Hispanic students at the University of Nebraska because everyone could basically go there.”
Bleemer said the public often gets fixated on admissions at elite colleges, but he said it’s important to remember that most college students in the U.S. attend bigger, public schools.
“The University of Oregon and the University of Washington really matter,” Bleemer said. “They’re high enrollers, but also economic drivers for those states.”
The finer details of the Education Department’s plan to collect expanded admissions data is still up in the air, but the original memo directs the agency to begin gathering information on Dec. 3.
In public comment on the plan, higher education groups led by the American Council on Education have said the reporting timeline is unrealistic and the new data guidance vague. They also questioned whether the Education Department has the resources or staffing to compile the data accurately, in the wake of job cuts and restructuring at the agency. The coalition called on the Education Department to delay the reporting requirements until next school year.
Staab doubts that the data, whenever it is collected, will show any nefarious activities going on at college admissions offices, no matter how selective they are. Admissions officers are working in the student’s best interest, he said.
“In the end, we’re not an office of denial,” Staab said. “We’re an office of admission.”
Reporters from partner stations in the Northwest News Network contributed to this story.