To the surprise of no one who has been following the story of the Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement (ACTS) survey component that the White House demanded be in place within 120 days in an executive order released on Aug 7, 2025, ACTS is now live.
ACTS was approved by the Office of Management and Budget and added to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data Survey (IPEDS) on December 18, just three days after a second comment period on the proposed survey closed and 13 days after the President’s deadline.
The deadline to complete this survey, which uses a whole new methodology of data reporting, covers the past seven years, requires multiple rounds of submissions and review and will, according to the Department of Education’s own estimate, take on average 200 hours to complete, will be March 18, 2026. Assuming that most offices did not begin work on ACTS in the week before or after Christmas, that gives them 10 weeks and 1 day (there are two federal holidays in this period) to complete the survey. That’s 408 hours of work, so ACTS by itself will take up almost half that time, on average.
Will offices have the staff needed to complete ACTS? Will graduate programs have the required data ready? Will colleges have held onto six years of data on applicants they rejected, including parental income and unweighted high school GPAs? Will the new data reporting tools work? Will the Department of Education’s National Center of Education Statistics, which lost most of its staff this past year, be able to process all this data and make it public? Will anyone be able to trust this data when it comes out? Will legacy admissions finally be exposed at elite colleges and universities?
These are just some of the questions we’re going to have to wait on answers for. Except the last one. The Trump Administration won’t be collecting any data on legacies, which is how we know this whole thing, which the Secretary of Education claims “will ensure that meritocracy and excellence once again characterize American higher education,” is a sham.
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