The original deadline was March 18.
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Some colleges and universities now have until April 6 to collect and report admissions data that the Education Department says it plans to use to identify unlawful race-based admissions practices, a federal judge decided Tuesday.
It’s the latest development in a lawsuit 17 Democratic state attorneys general filed against the department earlier this month over the Trump administration’s original demand that colleges and universities with selective admissions policies complete the new Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement survey by March 18.
Boston-based U.S. District Judge Dennis Saylor IV had already issued a temporary restraining order through today. On Tuesday, he heard arguments from lawyers representing the plaintiffs and the defendants before extending the temporary restraining order to April 6, by which point he plans to have made a decision on whether to issue a preliminary injunction.
“The likelihood of success on merits claims is at least sufficiently strong to merit maintaining the status quo for another week or 10 days or so,” Saylor said at the hearing in Boston. Doing so, he added, will give him more time “to consider all of the arguments more carefully about what is the appropriate thing to do here.”
But Tuesday’s extension only applies to the public institutions in the states represented in the lawsuit. And “in many ways, the situation has become more complex,” Christine Keller, executive director and CEO of the Association for Institutional Research (AIR), told Inside Higher Ed in an email after the hearing.
“With institutions now working under different deadlines across states and sectors, the situation remains uncertain and evolving,” she said. “Our guidance is for institutional research offices to continue their work to prepare and validate the data rather than pause and wait for further court action, while continuing to monitor guidance from the Department and consult with institutional leadership and legal counsel.”
“In practice,” Keller added, “institutions will need to move forward with their submissions while staying responsive to new information as it emerges.”
In August, President Donald Trump directed the department to collect years of disaggregated admissions data from colleges and universities—including the 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 verify that the institutions aren’t unlawfully considering race in admissions decisions after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such practices unconstitutional in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard in 2023.
The department estimated that the survey will take institutions 200 hours to complete in its first year, though some critics say it will take longer.
The rule was finalized in December, and the department gave institutions 90 days—until March 18—to submit the data. But many raised concerns that that wasn’t enough time to complete the new survey, which experts say is the largest expansion in the history of the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS).
Not long before the lawsuit was filed, AIR requested a three-month extension. ED responded with a conditional three-week extension. Days later, the coalition of state attorneys general sued the department, accusing it of violating the Administrative Procedure Act.
The plaintiffs argued that through the implementation of the ACTS survey, the administration seeks “to fundamentally change IPEDS, converting it from a reliable tool for methodical statistical reporting to a mechanism for law enforcement and the furthering of partisan policy aims.” The scope and rushed timeline of the data collection places “a considerable burden” on institutions and could subject them to “costly investigations based on unreliable data,” they also said.
‘Riddled’ With Problems
Reliability of the data collected through ACTS was addressed by both the plaintiffs and the defendants at the hearing Tuesday.
In addition to the quick timeline, institutional research offices have raised concerns about inconsistent guidance from the handful of employees remaining at the National Center for Education Statistics after mass layoffs at the department last year.
“The survey is riddled with so many problems,” Michelle Pascucci, a lawyer for the Massachusetts attorney general’s office, said at the hearing. “It has been done in such a hasty way that will ensure inconsistent information that there is simply no way for it to achieve the purpose that they seek.”
But the government argued that the department has the authority to implement ACTS as it has, and that it’s not concerned about data quality.
“What plaintiffs are seeking is an unrealistic standard of perfection,” Brittany Bruns, a lawyer representing the department, said. “Statistical analysis is not accustomed to using perfect data, and I don’t think that the Department of Education’s attempt to collect data that will show the public, researchers and the Office of Civil Rights [sic] how universities—particularly public, federally funded universities—are structuring their admissions should be thrown out just because of some difficulties with collecting or analyzing that information.”
