ACTS Deadline Shifts as ACE, Other Associations Support Legal Challenge

Those concerns are now playing out in court, where the administration's effort to collect admissions data disaggregated by race and sex-an effort it links to enforcement of the Supreme Court's Students for Fair Admissions decision-has been challenged by 17 states in a lawsuit filed last week in federal district court in Massachusetts.

ACE and 10 other higher education associations submitted an amicus brief yesterday supporting a motion brought by the plaintiffs for a stay of the ACTS while the court considers and decides the case. A hearing is scheduled for March 24, and the National Center for Education Statistics updated the ACTS deadline on the IPEDS website to March 25, pushing it back from the original March 18 deadline.

For decades, campuses have relied on deliberative and collaborative processes ED to ensure that new IPEDS data collections are clearly defined, technically feasible, and implemented with sufficient lead time to produce reliable data. The ACTS reflects none of that, and in letters last October and December ACE and other associations urged ED to reconsider it.

The amicus brief submitted yesterday reinforces concerns about the resulting risks to data quality and student privacy. It also speaks to the rushed implementation and failure to engage with commenters violating the Administrative Procedure Act, and to the executive branch's lack of statutory authority to implement the ACTS.

In the absence of clear and consistent direction, institutions have had to make real-time judgments about how to comply with the ACTS, and the risks of noncompliance. As ACE's Jon Fansmith told The Chronicle of Higher Education, which reported Wednesday on the strain this is placing on institutions, "(s)o now we have this massive, error-prone, inconsistent, ill-defined data request that's going to be sent back to a group of people who have already predetermined an outcome. It is, inherently, a trap."

Next week's court hearing hopefully will lead to some near-term clarity about institutional obligations and options while the legal challenge plays out.