Cases & Developments

The Department of Education issued a notice providing clarifications to the comment request on the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and the new “Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement” (ACTS) survey component, proposing that the mandate in data reporting would apply only to four-year institutions. The Department also proposed that otherwise eligible institutions that admit 100% of their applicants and do not award non-need-based aid would be exempt. Comments are due by December 15, 2025.

The American Council on Education (ACE) along with 37 other higher education associations sent a letter to the Department of Education expressing opposition to the Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement (ACTS) survey component. The letter expresses concern that the new survey component will “result in unreliable and misleading data that is intended to be used against institutions of higher education.” ACE argues that the  implementation timeline and new required data reporting are highly problematic, noting (1) institutions will have only 17 weeks to prepare the new required data, which totals nearly 70,000 reporting fields when expanded to cover the last 5 years of data (2) the likelihood of significant errors in the way that the data is reported and failure to provide an actual survey instrument as part of the proposal, and (3) the inclusion of “conflicting, nonexistent or noncomparable data elements.” ACE also notes other concerns including that the proposal was developed without following the appropriate process, will be enormously burdensome and will lead to inaccurate and erroneous conclusions. ACE concludes by urging the Department to reconsider its approach.  

The Department of Education (the Department), in accordance with the August 7th, 2025 Presidential Memorandum entitled “Ensuring Transparency in Higher Education Admissions,” is seeking to add the “Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement” (ACTS) survey component to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS).  ACTS is intended for four-year institutions who utilize selective college admissions and will collect data by race-sex pair on: (1) the count of institutions’ applied, admitted, and enrolled cohorts, both overall and further disaggregated by admission test score quintiles, GPA quintiles, ranges of family incomes, Pell Grant eligibility, and parental education; (2) the average high school graduate grade point average and admission test score quintiles for institutions’ applied, admitted, and enrolled cohorts; and (3) the count of students admitted via early action, early decision, or regular admissions. The Department seeks to capture data from the 2025-26 school year as well as from the five prior academic years in order to establish a baseline of admissions practices prior to SFFA v. Harvard. Finally, the Department is seeking feedback on aspects of the proposed data collection, with particular interest regarding whether there are other objective characteristics that the Department could use to identify institutions that have a low-risk or high-risk of noncompliance with Title VI, as well as whether open-enrollment institutions are at-risk of noncompliance with respect to scholarship awarding practices that provide preferential treatment based upon race, and the anticipated amount of time it will take for institutions to compile and submit the anticipated data elements in ACTS. Comments are due by October 14, 2025.