Dive Brief:
- Under a proposed plan from the Trump administration, colleges would have to submit six years worth of application and admissions data — disaggregated by student race and sex — as part of the 2025-26 Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System reporting cycle.
- President Donald Trump last week issued a memo requiring institutions to significantly expand the parameters of the admissions data they report to the National Center for Education Statistics, which oversees IPEDS.
- Colleges would need to submit a multi-year report "to establish a baseline of admissions practices" before the U.S. Supreme Court's 2023 ruling against race-conscious admissions, according to a notice filed Wednesday in the Federal Register.
Dive Insight:
The Trump administration has repeatedly charged that diversity efforts at colleges and elsewhere violate civil rights law.
"DEI has been used as a pretext to advance overt and insidious racial discrimination," according to the Federal Register notice, which was signed by Brian Fu, acting chief data officer of the department's Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development.
The additional student data questions — collectively titled the Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement, or ACTS — are meant to create "greater transparency" and "help to expose unlawful practices" at colleges, the notice said. It added that, with more information, the Education Department can better enforce Title VI laws, which bar discrimination based on race, color or national origin at federally funded institutions.
Under ACTS, colleges would have to report extensive demographic data for applicants, admitted students and those that ultimately enroll. And for the first year, they would have to do so for every academic year dating back to 2020-21.
Colleges would also need to report on their graduation rates from 2019-20 to 2024-25, the notice said.
Officials would be required to disaggregate student demographics by race and sex and cross-reference it with the following data points:
- Admissions test scores.
- GPA.
- Family income.
- Pell Grant eligibility.
- Parents' educational level.
Previously, the Education Department only required colleges to submit data by race for enrolled students.
Institutions would also have to report the numbers of their admitted student pool that applied via early action, early decision and regular admissions.
Graduate student data would be required to be disaggregated by field of study, as applicants typically apply directly to departments, not to the college overall, the notice said.
The Education Department is gearing ACTS at four-year institutions with selective admissions processes, which its notice said "have an elevated risk of noncompliance with the civil rights laws," both in admissions and scholarships.
The proposal says open-enrollment institutions like community colleges and trade schools are at low risk for noncompliance with Title IV in admissions.
However, the department on Wednesday requested public comment on open enrollment colleges' policies for awarding scholarships, an area it flagged as potentially providing "preferential treatment based upon race." It also asked for feedback about the types of institutions that should be required to submit the additional admissions information.
Public feedback could influence "whether we should narrow or expand the scope of institutions required to complete the ACTS component," it said.
The Education Department is also seeking feedback on how it could reduce the administrative cost of the increased data collection.
It estimated that, across the higher ed sector, the change will create over 740,000 hours of new work.
U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon fully endorsed Trump's memo last week, saying the administration would not allow "institutions to blight the dreams of students by presuming that their skin color matters more than their hard work and accomplishments." But it has yet to be seen how the agency will handle a dramatic increase in college data.
The Education Department's workforce has been greatly diminished since Trump retook office. The Trump administration laid off half of the department's employees in March. Although a federal judge temporarily blocked the mass terminations, the Supreme Court lifted that order last month while the litigation proceeds.
Peggy Carr, the ousted former commissioner of NCES, warned last month that the dramatic cuts to the department put it at risk of mishandling data and eroding the public's trust in its data.
"Accurate, reliable, nonpartisan data are the essential foundations of sound education policy," the long-time NCES official said in a statement. "Policy that isn’t informed by good data isn’t really policy — it’s guesswork."
The Trump administration abruptly fired Carr in February. President Joe Biden had appointed her to the post for a six-year term in 2021.
