Is Trump’s New Admissions Data Collection Following the Law?

What is ACTS?

The Department of Education wants to add a very large new component called the “Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement” (ACTS) to IPEDS, the annual survey that virtually every institution of higher education is required to complete. It’s not unusual for changes to be made to IPEDS, but they are typically made deliberatively in order to make sure stakeholders and experts have an opportunity to weigh in and the agency can take all needed steps to minimize the burden on institutions and obtain accurate data.

The Department of Education is not taking that route with ACTS. As published in the Federal Register in August, the Department of Education wants to add what could be more than 20,000 new data fields this academic year, quite possibly as soon as December. Worse yet, colleges and universities will be required colleges to submit all this data for 2025-6 and the previous five years, meaning that they will need to complete well over 100,000 data fields in the next six months or so for a survey component we all just learned about in August. Many of those fields are poorly defined, so institutions will struggle not only with the size of this administrative burden but also with the lack of guidance on how to accurately and consistently complete ACTS. We do need greater transparency in college admissions, but gathering more data is of no value if we cannot trust it. 

ACTS Poses Risks for Colleges and Universities

It would be bad enough if untrustworthy data were the only negative outcomes of implementing ACTS too quickly and carelessly, but for institutions of higher education the impact of getting the data wrong could be much worse. In his executive order calling for the creation of ACTS, President Trump also called on the Secretary of Education to “increase accuracy checks of submitted IPEDS” and “take remedial action…if institutions fail to submit data in a timely manner or are found to have submitted incomplete or inaccurate data.” It is unclear what “remedial action” entails, but given the administration’s track record it is not hard to imagine it weaponizing the incomplete and erroneous data submissions that will be inevitable if ACTS is implemented this year.

That potential punishment comes on top of the grave threat posed by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) taking what it wants from flawed ACTS data to launch a civil rights investigation into a university’s admissions practices. A few weeks after this EO was released, the Department of Education proposed a rule to “streamlin[e] the process by which OCR seeks termination of Federal financial assistance to institutions that intentionally violate Federal civil rights laws and refuse to voluntarily come into compliance.” The rule changes will make it easier to take federal financial aid dollars away from targeted institutions and students enrolled there.

The slapdash manner in which the Department of Education is going about creating ACTS may ultimately help institutions facing legal action. If the survey component ends up being foisted on colleges and universities this year, lawyers will have little trouble convincing a judge that the rushed and abnormal implementation of ACTS will have rendered any data collected useless. 

How Changes Are Supposed to be Made to IPEDS

The Department of Education cannot change IPEDS on a whim. There is a process, laid out by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in the Paperwork Reduction Act, that it must follow before adding even fairly small components to the survey, let alone one as large as ACTS. This process exists “to reduce, minimize and control burdens and maximize the practical utility and public benefit of the information created, collected, disclosed, maintained, used, shared and disseminated by or for the Federal government.” Here are the steps the Department of Education (ED) must follow:

1. ED publishes planned changes in the Federal Register for a 60-day comment period required by law. 
2. ED evaluates the public comments received and prepares a summary of the public comments, including actions taken by ED in response to the comments.The amount of time ED has to respond and what counts as a response is unspecified.
3. ED submits new proposed changes, reflecting any modifications made since the first publication of the proposed changes, to OMB.
4. ED publishes in the Federal Register an announcement that it has sent the proposed collection, reflecting any modifications made since the first publication of the proposed collection, to OMB and that the public has 30-days to comment
5. OMB has 30 days after the close of comments to review the comments and make its decision on whether to accept the proposed changes.
6. ED evaluates and responds to the comments submitted to OMB during the 30-day comment period.  ED then sends the proposed collection, reflecting any modifications made since the second publication of the proposed changes, to OMB for review.
7. OMB either approves, disapproves, or approves with substantive/material change. 

We are currently in the first step, the initial comment period.  After it ends on October 14, 2025, there will be six more steps to go through before ACTS can be added to IPEDS. That is a lot of work to do for a survey the Trump Administration wants to go to colleges and universities as soon as December.

This is where I say I’m not a lawyer; I just read the Paperwork Reduction Act. Based on that reading, there may already be legal concerns about ACTS.

Should the Comment Period Be Extended?

The Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) requires a sixty-day comment period as a minimum. If, however, a copy of the proposed collection of information and related instructions are not released at the same time that the announcement of changes is published, the comment period should be longer than 60 days in order to allow the public to get a copy. 

As of September 22, 2025, the public has not been provided a copy of the ACTS collection. The announcement does not even describe what will be collected in the graduate component, beyond a vague statement that it will collect “many of the same data elements [in the undergraduate component] are anticipated.” The PRA would appear to require a longer comment period than the current 60-day one. 

Has ED Conducted the Required Review of ACTS?

The PRA requires agencies creating a new collection of information to conduct a review including

• a functional description of the information to be collected:  the announcement does not provide anything close to that description for graduate programs and much of the description for undergraduate programs lacks adequate descriptions of the fields to be collected
• a plan for the collection of information: there is no plan laid out in the announcement
• a test of the collection of information through a pilot program:  there is no notice of a pilot program in the announcement, but a pilot would be a smart idea
• A plan for the management and use of the information: the announcement says nothing about how the data collected in ACTS will be made available for use
• A specific, objectively supported estimate of burden:  the announcement does provide an estimate, but it is not clear how specific or objective the estimate is. 

Is the Estimated Burden Accurate?

The announcement provides two estimates of the administrative burden ACTS will create. The first is for the “Total Estimated Number of Annual Responses,” which ED calculates to be 65,838.  It’s unclear what that number represents. It is not the number of institutions that need to answer the survey, which is ~1,700. It does not appear to be the number of staff who will work on the survey either, since that would come out to an average of nearly 40 employees per institution, which is surely too large a number. The estimated “Total Estimated Number of Annual Burden Hours,” which ED calculates to be 740,511, would come out to an average of approximately 435 hours per institution. Is that an accurate number?  It is hard to tell. It certainly looks like a very large number, particularly if it is not spread across many staff members. It would take one person more than two months to complete this survey alone if they worked on nothing else for 40 hours per week.

The ACTS estimate only looks stranger if we compare it to the last change to IPEDS, which added a Cost survey that combined questions from two existing surveys and added two new questions about costs. IPEDS also started collecting data disaggregated by race and ethnicity on applicants and admits, and it eliminated a survey on academic libraries. All in all, the changes were much smaller than those proposed in ACTS, even though they affected more institutions. (ACTS, recall, will only apply to institutions that do not employ an open admissions policy.) The estimated burden for the change, however, was essentially identical to ACTS for the number of annual responses (65,536 to ACTS’s 65,868) and just 16% larger for annual burden hours (636,660 to ACTS’s 740,511).

Can ACTS require 5 Years of Previous Data?

One of the most daunting elements of the proposed new data collection is that the Department of Education expects colleges and universities to provide six years of data for ACTS. The estimated burden appears not to reflect the impact of completing six surveys in a year, and it is quite likely that many institutions will not have the previous five years worth of data they had not previously provided for IPEDS. It is not clear that it is legal to ask them for it either.  According to the PRA, OMB will not approve a collection that asks institutions to train records for more than three years, with only a few exceptions listed below. Admissions records are not among the exceptions.

Let Your Voice Be Heard

The comment period on ACTS is open until October 14, 2025. You can comment here.

There are currently over 1,700 comments posted on the proposed changes. Unfortunately, it appears that more than 1,000 of them are the exact same comment–of support–submitted under different names. It is very important for the Department of Education to hear from many more people and, especially, from the institutions of higher education that will have to deal directly with ACTS and that understand better than anyone the challenges they will face if the survey is implemented this year.

My advice is to talk very concretely about the concerns that your institution has about ACTS. Broad expressions of disagreement will likely do little good, but talking precisely about difficulties your institution will face could be much more effective in delaying the start of this survey for at least another year. Some areas you might want to highlight, if they are relevant:

• Adequate staffing
• Training staffing
• Preparing and testing reporting systems
• Implementation costs
• Lack of guidance on data elements (with examples)
• Lack of Data
• Inability to provide the last five years of data
• Quality of data reported under rushed conditions
• Privacy Risks and Small Cell Sizes

It is hard to imagine the Department of Education dropping the ACTS survey entirely, but there is some chance the survey could be scaled down and/or delayed. For that to happen, however, the agency needs to hear from people.