Seventeen states sued the U.S. Department of Education on Wednesday over the agency’s new requirement that four-year colleges provide detailed admissions and applicant data broken down by race and sex. The lawsuit comes after higher education groups and experts have been voicing concerns for months about colleges not being able to provide the requested data on time and urging the agency to extend the deadline.
In August, the Education Department unveiled plans to compile the data through an addition to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, the long-standing collection of surveys administered by the agency each year. Along with new data for the 2025-26 year, the department also said it would seek disaggregated data from the last six years’ worth of admitted students and applicants.
The aim? The Education Department said the new data collection would track whether colleges were complying with the landmark 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision barring race-conscious admissions practices.
The new data collection requirements include information on standardized test scores, family income, and GPA — all broken down by race and sex for applicants, admits and enrolled students. Previously, colleges were only required to report racial data for enrolled students.
Public, private nonprofit and for-profit colleges that primarily grant bachelor’s or higher degrees are required to fill out the new survey, unless they have open admissions or don’t award non-need-based aid.
Wednesday’s lawsuit from Democrat-led states argues that the Education Department is unlawfully expanding IPEDS data collection to further “partisan ends” and didn’t follow procedures required by the Administrative Procedure Act to create the new survey. It also accuses the new data collection of being “arbitrary and capricious” by disregarding the “onerous burden” it places on colleges.
They’re asking a federal judge to block the new survey. They also asked the court to declare that the Education Department acted unlawfully when creating it and to block them from forcing colleges from completing the new survey.
The department did not respond to a request for comment by publication time Thursday. Below, we’re breaking down three things to know about the lawsuit and the status of the new survey.
17 states are accusing the Education Department of ‘sloppy implementation’ of data collection
The coalition of states argue that the Education Department hasn’t given colleges enough time to properly collect the requested data. In the past, the agency has typically given colleges at least a year to review a new survey’s requirements before they must provide the requested data, according to the lawsuit. In this case, they will have had only months.
The longer timeline ensures that new surveys collect “reliable and statistically valid data,” that they won’t put student privacy at risk, and colleges have the ability and time to “accurately and completely” respond to them, the attorneys general argued.
But the schedule and process for creating the new survey hasn’t followed those norms, the lawsuit alleged.
In August, President Donald Trump issued a memo stating that his administration would use IPEDS to track whether colleges still considered race in their admissions in defiance of the 2023 Supreme Court ruling.
That same day, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced the new survey component to track admissions and applicant data broken down by race and sex.
The Education Department sought public comment on the proposal that same month. However, it only shared “general categories” of the new information colleges would be required to submit instead of the actual text of the survey, according to the lawsuit. That stands in contrast with previous practice, the lawsuit said.
By December, the agency’s Office of Management and Budget approved the new survey and the Education Department released it. Colleges are expected to turn in the new data by March 18 — less than one week away.
The 17-state coalition attacked the Education Department’s process, calling it a “sloppy implementation” that would have severe consequences, including “costly investigations based on unreliable data.”
“There is no way for institutions to reasonably deliver accurate data in the federal government’s rushed and arbitrary timeframe, and it is unfair for schools to be threatened with fines, potential losses of funding, and baseless investigations should they not fulfill the Administration’s request,” Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell said in a statement Wednesday.
Similarly, California Attorney General Rob Bonta called the data collection a “fishing expedition.”
“This latest sham demand threatens to turn a reliable tool into a partisan bludgeon,” Bonta said.
Given how detailed some of the survey questions are, some of the data points will only include a handful of students — or sometimes just one, the states argued in their complaint.
That “poses a significant risk for student privacy, with the level of disaggregation creating the possibility of inadvertently identifying individual students and revealing highly personal information regarding those students, such as financial aid and GPA,” they wrote.
The Education Department has been asked to delay the deadline
In late February, the Association for Institutional Research sent a letter to the Education Department requesting a three-month extension — until June 18 — of the deadline.
In that letter, AIR referenced a survey of nearly 400 data and institutional research experts at colleges it completed earlier that month about the new reporting requirements. Sixty percent of respondents said they were “very or somewhat concerned about their institution’s ability to submit accurate data by the deadline.”
Anonymous comments collected via the survey didn’t mince words.
“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,” one respondent said.
The Education Department has given some colleges the ability to request a three-week extension, according to a notice AIR posted on its website last week. To qualify for the extension, colleges must have already completed all of the survey’s screening questions and uploaded three years of data files to IPEDS.
Colleges have pushed back on the requirements before
Higher ed groups and colleges have blasted the new reporting requirements since they were first proposed. In an October public comment, American Council on Education President Ted Mitchell, on behalf of more than three dozen higher education organizations, expressed worry that the new survey would “result in unreliable and misleading data that is intended to be used against institutions of higher education.”
Moreover, Mitchell said the survey was seeking out some information that colleges don’t collect and couldn’t obtain.
Given that issue, along with the compressed time frame and other concerns, the data was nearly certain to contain “significant errors,” he argued. “As a result, any attempt to draw conclusions as to what this means for institutions’ admissions practices from this data will be at best misleading and most likely, simply wrong.”
Higher education groups and colleges also spoke out about the strain this would put on institutions, especially those with smaller staffs.
For instance, the University of Indianapolis, a small religious college, has just two staff members in its institutional research office.
“Meeting the new requirements would necessitate developing new data extracts, coding structures, validation routines, and quality assurance checks — all while maintaining existing reporting obligations,” Ryon Kaopuiki, the university’s vice president for enrollment management, said in a public comment. The public comment period ended Oct. 14, and the Education Department released the survey about two months later.
