On August 7, 2025, the White House issued the presidential memorandum Ensuring Transparency in Higher Education Admissions. This memo called for greater transparency in college admissions to “expose unlawful practices” related to the consideration of race in college admissions. This call for transparency was based on the administration’s claim that a lack of data on college admissions raised uncertainty as to whether colleges and universities were continuing to consider race in admissions despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, which sharply limited the use of race in college admissions.

According to a new report, the Trump administration’s demand for seven years of admissions data took a heavy toll on colleges and left many campus officials worried about the accuracy of what they submitted. The report, produced by the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) and the Urban Institute, examines the impact of a new federal survey, called the “Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement (ACTS).” Fewer than one in five institutions of higher education had all the necessary data to complete the federal government’s ACTS survey, according to this research.

The report included responses from 596 institutions about the experience of compiling the data the Department of Education (DOE) demanded, as well as feedback from several in-person and virtual focus groups and listening sessions. Overwhelmingly, institutions reported not only that it was burdensome to gather the data — especially due to the short time frame they were given—but also that they did not have access to all the historical data the government requested. The recommendations outlined in this report offer the DOE a starting point for improving future ACTS collections while strengthening data quality and reducing the burden on the people responsible for reporting the data.