Community colleges could be exempt from most of the new transparency and reporting requirements of college admissions data, as directed by a presidential memorandum issued last week.
According to an Education Department (ED) document to be published Friday in the Federal Register, open-access institutions, such as community colleges, “have minimal or no risk for civil rights noncompliance in admissions,” opening the door for possible exemption.
In the unpublished information collection request (ICR), ED lays out its vision for a new admissions data collection system, to be called the “Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement” (ACTS) survey. It will require all selective colleges and universities to report applied, admitted and enrolled cohorts by race-sex pair, further disaggregated by test scores, GPA, family income, Pell Grant eligibility, parental education and more. ACTS will also require colleges to report the count and average amount of students receiving institutional grant aid, merit-based grant aid, need-based grant aid and local, state or federal aid by race-sex pair.
Colleges also will be expected to report data from the past five years to establish a baseline of admissions and aid practices. This represents a significant increase in both reporting to the federal government and, for many colleges and universities, data collection on students altogether. It is not yet clear how institutions will be expected to gain access to and report all the data mentioned in the ICR and how to shield personally identifiable information in small, disaggregated cohorts.
Although it appears open-access institutions may be exempt, the ICR asks whether the institutions should still be required to report financial aid information to prove that they are not illegally considering race in awarding aid. The American Association of Community Colleges will communicate that community colleges are not engaging in illegal discrimination in the awarding of institutional aid and that subjecting campuses to this increased reporting would be unnecessary and unduly burdensome.
