It is hard to keep up with all the developments that have happened this month with the Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement (ACTS). After 17 states attorney generals sued the Department of Education (ED )and the Office of Management and Budget for illegally implementing this new survey component in the annual IPEDS survey, a federal judge issued an injunction that will relieve public universities and colleges from submitting ACTS data until a court decides if the component is legal. Later this week, the same judge will decide whether the injunction will be extended to 210 more colleges, mostly private.
Judge Dennis Saylor issued the injunction on 2 main grounds. First, “the rushed and chaotic manner in which the ACTS was promulgated… epitomizes arbitrary and capricious agency action.” Second, he wrote, the problems with ACTS “are compounded by the fact that [ED] is in the process of dismantling itself, and closing NCES, in response to another presidential directive….This is not a merely technical issue.”
If Judge Saylor was worried about ED’s ability to collect, verify, and publish ACTS data earlier this month he should be deeply concerned by a significant new development. Last week, the education professor Robert Kelchen noticed that the data firm Applied Enterprise Management (AEM) had signed a contract on April 15 to work on IPEDS, with the contract beginning on April 30, 2026. He wondered if AEM had replaced Research Triangle Institute (RTI) as the IPEDS contractor.
I was initially skeptical because
- RTI had handled the IPEDS contract for over 20 years;
- After DOGE gutted ED and NCES, RTI became the main repository of knowledge about IPEDS administration and losing RTI would mean losing decades of expertise that was needed now more than ever;
- RTI is in the midst of administering the first year of ACTS, which it created out of whole cloth under enormous pressure with little time and a strapped budget, and giving the contract to another organization would be both wrongheaded and wrong; and
- RTI’s contract runs through April, 2027.
Well, I should not have been skeptical.
Multiple sources have confirmed that AEM is taking over the IPEDS contract from RTI this year. RTI will likely finish out the work on ACTS, messy and incomplete as all that data will be ,as well as this year’s other surveys, but the work going forward, starting with the Fall IPEDS survey will almost certainly be carried out by AEM.
AEM has a number of federal contracts. It is not new to this world. At the same time, the timing of this change (which also comes with a smaller budget than in the past) should give us all pause and concern about the integrity of IPEDS data. ACTS is the largest change that has been made to IPEDS in a very long time, if not the largest ever. It has not gone very well so far. Making this change now plunges the accuracy and value of the ACTS data even further into question.
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