By SUSAN JONES
In August, the Trump administration ordered the Education Department to collect new data from universities — including test scores, grade point averages, race, sex and income ranges of applied, admitted and enrolled students dating as far back as 2019 — in order to make sure schools weren’t considering race in admissions decisions.
The rule requiring the new Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement (ACTS) survey — which the administration says is to prove schools are complying with the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard — was finalized in December and gave schools three months to comply. The original deadline is March 18, and many schools, including Pitt, have been working diligently to comply.
On March 13, a federal judge in Boston temporarily blocked the Trump administration from requiring colleges and universities to collect and report admissions data disaggregated by race and gender, Reuters reported.
The temporary restraining order comes in response to a lawsuit filed last week by 17 Democratic states over the administration’s demand that colleges and universities complete the new ACTS survey by March 18, Inside Higher Ed reported. The judge’s order extends the deadline through March 25 “to permit a hearing and orderly resolution of the issues.”
Earlier this month, the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) asked the Education Department to extend the deadline by three months, according to Inside Higher Education, after a February survey by AIR found that 15% had either not started or were in the early planning stages, and 66% were still actively collecting data.
Pitt’s Institutional Research and Analytics team “has been diligently working on completing the Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement (ACTS) for all of Pitt’s four-year campuses. The team has been consulting with various professional organizations and University counsel, as needed, and is on track to complete the submission by the deadline,” a University spokesman said. “That being said, an extension of the deadline would certainly be welcome.”
The new reporting requirements are an expansion of the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, which typically institutions have a full year to collect and submit.
On March 6, AIR posted a notice that the Education Department was allowing schools to apply for a three week extension, until April 18, if they: Submit ACTS screening questions for all seven years and upload data from at least three of those years to the IPEDS system. The extension request needed to be submitted by March 18.
An Education Department spokesperson said in an email to Inside Higher Ed that the agency was “granting limited extensions to the reporting deadline where institutions have shown a good faith effort to comply and extraordinary circumstances warranting extension.”
Before the judge’s ruling, AIR surveyed 390 institutional research and data professionals. The majority (65%) said that staffing capacity and workload constraints were the greatest challenge to compiling the data. Of those surveyed, 71% also found the ready availability of the requested data to be a moderate or major challenge.
Some of the comments on the survey included:
“A 90-day turnaround is not reasonable to expect colleges and universities to be able to compile seven years’ worth of data to meet requirements which were not being discussed twelve months ago.”
“Building a single year of data is enough of a challenge… Asking for 7 years of data all at once is an extremely tall task.”
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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