Recent wins in IHEP efforts to restore federal higher education data collections

Data contract terminations and staffing cuts at the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) – the backbone of our nation’s education data infrastructure – shook the field earlier this spring. Researchers, educators, policymakers, and student success practitioners rely on federal data collections administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), housed within IES, to understand how students access, afford, and make progress toward a college credential, as well as their eventual workforce outcomes. Following the Trump Administration’s abrupt cancellation of contracts for studies and data tools, termination of remote data access, and major reductions in staffing, we sprang into action to protect high-quality federal data. Those efforts are paying off. 

Within weeks of the data collection contract cancellations, we led a coalition of nearly 90 organizations and researchers in sending a letter to Congress that detailed deep concerns. We then debuted a blog series illuminating the importance of IES studies and resources, including how state and federal policymakers rely on IES data. Our public statements raised alarms about the mass layoffs and contract cancellations, highlighting the impact of those actions on students, educators, policymakers, and the country at large.  

Importantly, for the first time in IHEP’s history, we entered litigation. In April, IHEP and the Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP), represented by Public Citizen Litigation Group, sued the Department of Education to stop its unlawful dismantling of IES.  

While our case moves forward, the Department has already remedied several of the actions we challenged in court:

• The 2024 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS) contract was reinstated, after being cancelled. As a large, nationally representative study with detailed student interviews and administrative data, NPSAS provides crucial insights on affordability, student enrollment, and on-campus experiences that are not available through any other sources. Other institution-level data can’t tell us what students can afford, whether they can cover tuition and living expenses, or which students face the greatest financial barriers. NPSAS data have been used to inform California legislation supporting student parents, federal policy around FAFSA simplification, and other topics. The NPSAS contract was cancelled in February, then reinstated in June.
• Remote access to restricted-use NCES data will continue for researchers. Compared with the publicly accessible NCES data on DataLab, the restricted-use data provide opportunities for deeper analysis and access to more variables. In February, IES announced that the remote access program would end in June. After we filed our lawsuit, IES announced that remote access on its existing platform will continue through December 31, 2025 and that NCES is exploring long-term options for remote access to restricted-use data.
• After more than five months, IES processed our requests to publish analyses using restricted-use data. To meet privacy and security requirements, researchers must submit analyses that utilize restricted-use data to IES for disclosure risk review before publishing their findings. Before staffing cuts at IES, those reviews took five to ten business days. Our push for IES to move through its backlog of review requests will make it possible for IHEP and other researchers to share important insights about college access, affordability, success, and post-college outcomes.
• The contract to support DataLab was reinstated, after being cancelled. DataLab is a secure, web-based platform that allows users to easily access education data collected by NCES. Through DataLab, users can create custom analyses and explore ready-built data tables using NPSAS and other NCES data. We encountered technical challenges with accessing data on DataLab and included the DataLab contract cancellation in our initial court filing. After cancellation in February, the DataLab support contract was reinstated in July.  

While IES’s remedial actions are notable wins, more advocacy is still needed to protect and preserve essential IES data collections. For example, the contract for the Beginning Postsecondary Students longitudinal study (BPS) remains cancelled. BPS is a large, nationally representative study that tracks students’ experiences and outcomes through their postsecondary enrollment and after college. The three-year follow-up study for students who started college in 2019-20 is complete and NCES published its “First Look” report on that follow-up study (BPS:20/22) in September 2024. But the data for BPS:20/22 are still unavailable to researchers and all remaining work related to the 2025 follow-up study (BPS:20/25) has been cancelled. 

As champions for postsecondary data, we will continue boldly advocating for essential, high-quality federal data collections, along with the staff and funding at IES that make that work possible. IES’s data collections cannot easily be replicated by state data systems or private entities. Most importantly, dismantling our federal data infrastructure will hurt students, institutions, states, researchers, and policymakers. To help students make informed decisions about college and policymakers develop strategies to improve student outcomes, high-quality federal data are essential.