There’s an old piece of journalistic wisdom that the answer to any headline posed in the form of a yes/no question is always NO. Yeah, this is one of those headlines.
In its response to the lawsuit filed by seventeen state attorneys general, the Department of Education (ED) has revealed important new information about its plans for the ACTS survey component and about the current state of the agency. (Here’s a quick explainer on ACTS.)
1. The Department of Education plans to release ACTS data in the summer of 2026 so that students can use it during the admissions process.
In a normal cycle, IPEDS data can take anywhere from nine months to two years to be published. For example, the most recent release on enrollment of Pell students, which came out this past January, was for academic year 2023-24. It’s a slow process and should be sped up, but the the ED office that is responsible for IPEDS, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), has long been understaffed and it needs time to make sure the data is accurate.
Since ACTS is a brand new, incredibly large data collection that employs a novel approach to gathering and analyzing the data, you would expect the time between collection and publication to be even longer than normal. Heck, you would want it to take longer. That would be the reasonable and responsible thing to do.
Reasonable and responsible is not exactly ACTS’s style.
Rushing, however, is. Here’s the timeline for ACTS:
- August 7, 2025: A White House executive order calls out the need to “expos[e] unlawful practices and ultimately [rid] society of shameful, dangerous racial hierarchies.”
- August 15, 2025: ED publishes an announcement that it would be adding a new component this year to IPEDS and provides a 60-day comment period as required by law. It receives over 3,000 comments.
- November 13, 2025: ED publishes its response to comments and an update to its plans for ACTS. A 30-day comment period begins.
- December 18, 2025: ED adds ACTS to IPEDS. The deadline to complete the survey is March 18.
- February 2026: Institutions are allowed to request an extension to April 8, 2026.
- March 2026: Seventeen states file suit against the Secretary of Education and the Office of Management and Budget, claiming that ACTS violates numerous laws. Public institutions of higher education in those states are given an extension, as are less than 100 other private institutions represented by the Association of American Universities and the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts. ED extends the deadline for all institutions not covered by the court ruling to March 31, 2026.
- Summer 2026: If ED gets its way, ACTS statistics will be published in some fashion (a user friendly dashboard? addition to the College Scorecard?) that will make it possible for students to consider them before applying to college.
Here’s the relevant paragraph:
2. This Department of Education should leave college admission advice to the professionals.
The sentence highlighted above gives us a preview of how ED is going to frame the data coming out of ACTS. The agency wants Americans to believe that college admissions is determined by “race, sex, and other characteristics” that determine whether a student will get “a coveted spot at their dream school.” There is a lot to criticize here, but I want to focus on three items.
First, most “coveted spot[s]” in college admissions do not not need to be “secured.” As I’ve written elsewhere, for most students it’s not that hard to get into college. Half of all four-year colleges admit more than 77% of applicants.
It’s bad enough that so many families (and journalists) obsess over the acceptance rates of tiny proportion of colleges; it’s depressing that the Department of Education put this massive administrative burden on close to 2,000 institutions because they were worried about the tiny segment of students who go to highly rejective institutions (less than 5 percent!)
Second, ED misunderstands how college admissions works. Even at highly selective institutions, college admissions is not based on race, sex, or any single component. College admissions is a complex process than takes place within an complex ecosystem. Successful applicants have to meet a whole range of qualifications even to be considered. Saying that admissions is “x-based” only makes sense if you ignore all the variables that had to be satisfied before x to be considered for admission.
Even if a student does have that component that might tip them into admission over other qualified students, it does not mean they will be admitted. For instance, colleges want to admit students they think will enroll. I know a student who was rejected this year by a college in Los Angeles that admits almost half its applicants, only to be accepted by one in New York that admits less than 5 percent. The LA school likely did not want to burn an admission on a student who they figured was never going to enroll.
Third, the Department of Education is giving students terrible advice on applying to college. Finding a college’s acceptance rate is already very easy. ED’s own College Scorecard already shares that information. Acceptance rates can certainly figure into the decision to apply, but I don’t think any responsible college admissions counselor would tell students whether they should apply based on admit rates alone. I strongly suspect that the difference in admit rates will vary so little by race and sex that they won’t be at all helpful for students. Does anyone really need disaggregated data to realize it is really hard for practically everyone to get into Princeton or Stanford?
Suggesting that students should decide whether to apply to a college based on admit rates for their race and sex, using ACTS data that has been collected in such a rushed manner, is irresponsible. How should students look at test scores by race and in relation to acceptance rates when three-quarters or more of the students have not submitted a score? How should students consider data on GPAs when many colleges will likely not be reporting that data? Beyond the compromised nature of ACTS data, there is the question of what to make of the role the Students for Fair Admissions decision has played in admissions. As I’ve documented elsewhere, enrollment outcomes post-SFFA have not been what some may have expected. How will students be advised on how to consider admit rates and enrollment outcomes from two very different moments in college admissions?
I want to note, too, how ED frames the release of ACTS data in the language of identity politics and resentment. It talks about using the data to avoid applying to schools where they “have no realistic chance of admission,” not as a way to find colleges that might be a better match or how information about early decision might help a student know when to apply. No, what is on ED’s mind is the belief that some student’s dreams are being denied by colleges that admit students based on their race or sex. I will let you decide which students they have in mind.
3. ED misunderstands the administrative burden ACTS is creating.
As part of its defense of ACTS, ED points out that as of March 30, 2026, 890 colleges and universities have submitted their ACTS survey data (no word on how complete the data are). In other words, less than half the institutions required to submit the data had done so a day before the extended deadline. Weird flex, as they used to say on the internet.
The next claim is even more revealing about how poor a handle the agency has on ACTS. ED points out that a number of very large universities have submitted some or all the data, as if to say that if these big schools can do it, so can everyone else. What this argument misses is that the administrative burden ACTS places on universities and colleges, including many regional publics, has much less to do with the number of students they enroll than it does with the number of staff they employ. Large, well-funded institutions tend to have larger, better-funded offices of institutional research, using newer, better technology to complete survey data. At some smaller colleges, the office of institutional research employs one or two people. Late as the announcement of ACTS came, many smaller institutions had to find the money in their already stretched budgets to cover the cost of implementing ACTS at their institution.
This fundamental misunderstanding of which institutions would struggle the most with ACTS should come as no surprise, since ED made little to no effort to engage stakeholders in the process of creating this admissions survey.
4. We now know how many people work at NCES.
It’s been unclear just how many employees were left at NCES after DOGE wiped out about half of the Department of Education. It’s been speculated that there were just three employees left to administer the National Assessment of Educational Progress, IPEDS, the Digest of Education Statistics, the Condition of Education Report, and more. According to the agency’s filing, there are now thirteen. That’s down from about 100 full-time employees pre-DOGE.
It’s important to note the sleight of hand the agency is attempting with the numbers here. It points out that before 2025 there were eight employees at NCES who worked on IPEDS, and that much of the work was handled by contractors. This is true. But then ED claims that NCES is up to thirteen employees, but it does not say how many work on IPEDS. That sounds like there are now 13 people who handle all the responsibilities of NCES.
5. Higher Ed Needs to Get Ready
ACTS data are coming sooner than we expected. The data are going to be deeply compromised. Higher ed experts and statisticians are going to have to work very hard to figure out what’s of any value in the data when it comes out. They’re not going to have the time to do that before students, families, counselors, journalists, and policymakers are going to see the statistics and use them to make decisions. The Department of Education has already started framing the numbers in the language of identity politics and resentment. It’s long past time for leaders in higher education to start telling their own story about college admissions.
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