Right now, the most granular admissions data any applicant can get for free is a school's own Common Data Set -- an admit rate, a middle-50% test-score range, maybe a class-rank distribution. A new federal reporting requirement, if it survives an active lawsuit, would go dramatically further: real admissions outcomes broken out by race, sex, GPA band, test-score band, family income, and whether you applied early or regular. It doesn't exist yet, and as of this week it's genuinely unclear whether it ever will.

What ACTS actually is

The Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement (ACTS) is a new component added to IPEDS -- the same federal data system that already powers tools like the College Scorecard -- following an August 7, 2025 presidential memorandum directing the Department of Education to increase transparency around college admissions. Four-year, degree-granting institutions (with a narrow exemption for schools that admit 100% of applicants and award no non-need-based aid) are required to report undergraduate and graduate admissions, aid, and enrollment data going back six full years, covering the 2019-20 through 2025-26 cycles.

What makes ACTS different from anything currently public is how finely the data is sliced. Institutions must report application, admission, and enrollment counts broken out by race-sex pairing, and further cross-tabulated by GPA quintile, test-score quintile, family income range, Pell Grant eligibility, first-generation status, and application round (early action or early decision versus regular decision). Schools also report financial aid awards and first-year cumulative GPA for enrolled students. Individual student records never leave the institution -- each school first builds a private, de-identified file, runs it through a federal "Aggregator Tool," and submits only the resulting aggregate counts to NCES.

Why this would actually matter to an applicant

Today, the closest thing to a scattergram of "students like me" outcomes at a specific school doesn't really exist from free federal data -- Scorecard only publishes 25th/50th/75th percentile test-score bands, with no GPA distribution field at all, and the Common Data Set itself only reports a school's overall percentile ranges, not admission rates by band. ACTS would be a real step past both: instead of "the middle 50% scored between 1400 and 1520," you could eventually see something closer to "applicants in the top test-score quintile from this income range were admitted at X% in the early round." That's a meaningfully sharper picture of where you'd actually land -- not just where the school's overall range sits.

Why it's currently tied up in court

ACTS opened for data collection on December 18, 2025, with a keyholder deadline of March 18, 2026. On March 11, 2026, a coalition of seventeen states led by Massachusetts sued the Department of Education, arguing the rule was adopted in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, the Paperwork Reduction Act, and the E-Government Act -- largely on the grounds that the rollout was too rushed for institutions to comply with accurately. A federal court in Massachusetts issued a temporary restraining order within days, then a preliminary injunction on April 3, 2026 blocking enforcement against public institutions in those seventeen states. On April 24, 2026, the court extended that injunction to cover twelve additional intervenor-plaintiff states as well, finding the survey was likely adopted in an "arbitrary and capricious" manner.

The Department of Education didn't appeal outright -- it asked the court for a "remand without vacatur," a procedural move that lets the agency go back and more fully explain its original reasoning rather than starting the rulemaking over from scratch. The court granted that request and set a deadline: the Department has to file its supplemental explanation by September 11, 2026 -- less than a week from now as of this writing. That filing, and how the court responds to it, is the next real signal of whether ACTS survives in anything like its current form.

Where things actually stand right now

Institutions in the roughly two dozen states covered by the injunction aren't required to comply while it's in effect. Everywhere else, the survey deadline (extended along the way to March 31, 2026 for most schools) technically still applies, though no confirmed date exists yet for when any resulting aggregate data would actually become publicly viewable through IPEDS or the College Scorecard. Nothing about this changes what's available on this site's own college profile pages or in your actual Reach/Target/Likely results today -- those already draw on the real federal data that does exist and get updated data whenever new sources go live, the same way Common Data Set factors already feed the Ivy League cluster's admission-factor breakdowns. ACTS would be additive, not a replacement, and only if it survives the current legal fight.

It's also not the first time the federal government has forced schools to disclose data they'd rather not -- the Clery Act's campus-crime-statistics requirement followed a similar arc decades ago: a mandatory, disaggregated reporting requirement that colleges initially resisted before it became a normal, expected part of what a school has to publish about itself.

What this means for you

  • Nothing changes for your applications this cycle. ACTS data isn't public yet, and it's legally uncertain whether or when it will be -- don't wait on it or expect to see it factored into any tool, including this site's, in the near term.
  • Watch for the September 11, 2026 filing if you're tracking this. It's the next concrete step in a fight that's been moving fast since March, and it will shape whether ACTS survives close to its original design.
  • Understand what it would add, not replace. Even if it goes live, ACTS would sit alongside the Common Data Set and Scorecard, not substitute for either -- each source answers a slightly different question.
  • The core lesson holds regardless of outcome: the finer-grained the data get, the less useful a single admit-rate number becomes on its own -- a reason to understand how CDS's existing sections actually break down a school's numbers now, rather than wait for a more detailed version that may or may not arrive.

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