Education Department Cuts Could Leave Colleges Without Critical Data. Here’s What Students Need To Know.

By

Matthew Arrojas

Updated on May 23, 2025

Edited by

Alex Pasquariello

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Experts told BestColleges that cuts to the non-partisan Institute of Education Sciences could lead to gaps in the data that is used to analyze the U.S. higher education landscape and improve student outcomes.

Credit: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / AFP / Getty Images

• The Department of Education has slashed staffing at the Institute of Education Sciences in recent months.
• These cuts have left experts worrying that the timeliness and quality of higher education data may suffer.
• College students and institutions are heavily reliant on federal data.
• Grant cuts will also hinder efforts to improve outcomes across colleges and universities.

Nearly 1.97 million students earned a bachelor’s degree in 2023. The annual price of attendance for undergraduate students, adjusted for inflation, has risen 62.1% over the past two decades. As of 2020, master’s students held 26.3% of federal student loan debt despite comprising just 16.2% of all borrowers.

How do we know all this?

The Department of Education (ED), through the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), collects, analyzes, and distributes data about virtually every element of the college journey.

The department’s initiatives have helped students compare colleges through the College Scorecard, while research sponsored by IES has led to improvements in college completion rates over the past 15 years.

But as President Donald Trump in his second term seeks to dismantle ED, many of those data-enabled strides are now at risk, experts warned BestColleges.

A lawsuit filed in early April illuminated the extent of the Trump administration’s cuts at IES. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which compiles and distributes higher education statistics, now has just three employees. Only three contracting officers are left at IES.

Total staffing at IES shrank from 186 employees to approximately 20 in just two months.

Meanwhile, the Department of Government Efficiency has canceled dozens of contracts with third-party data collectors, according to EdWeek Market Brief reporting.

The Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP) co-filed the lawsuit in hopes of reversing mass layoffs. Diane Cheng, vice president of research and policy at IHEP, told BestColleges that the department’s data operations are essential in helping students make smart enrollment decisions.

“All students and families deserve access to the consumer information they can gain from [the department],” she said. “It’s what students and families use to answer questions about cost and outcomes. It’s really essential.”

Former employees at ED say it’s unrealistic to expect the department to maintain its output given the recent layoffs.

“NCES is the place that tries to bring a single lens to that vast and complex system that we know as U.S. higher education,” Thomas Brock, acting director of IES from 2017-2018, told BestColleges. “All of that is at risk with the cuts that have taken place recently.”

Higher Education Depends on Federal Data

The U.S. higher education system is a large, complex, and decentralized system.

Each state runs its own system of public colleges and universities, and those systems can vary considerably from one another. Even within state boundaries, for-profit and nonprofit institutions enroll millions of students and can operate with vastly different goals in mind.

Jennifer Engle, director of policy and strategy at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, told BestColleges that IES’ data helps cut through the noise.

“One of the key values the department brings to the field is trusted information that can be compared across institutions,” she said, “and that can be compared across states.”

Jon Boeckenstedt, vice provost of enrollment management at Oregon State University, said this data is also helpful for institutions to make better decisions. Universities need to better understand their competitors so that they can set enrollment and tuition goals appropriately, he told BestColleges.

He said several years ago, his university looked at its net cost for the lowest-income Oregonians. When Oregon State found that it had higher costs than other institutions in the state, it enacted institutional aid changes to address the issue.

“You can be either really proud of the data or hate it,” Boeckenstedt said. “It’s a competitive industry, so we want to be better than our competitors.”

The data also has implications for the department itself. It uses IES data to enforce oversight rules like gainful employment and the debt-to-earnings ratio; two programs that aim to reduce the chance of taxpayer dollars going to unsavory institutions.

ED uses data collected from institutions to allocate funding for initiatives like educational assistance grants for student veterans, Engle said.

She stressed that the department’s responsibilities don’t end at collecting administrative data.

IES also awards research grants that help lead to structural improvements within higher education. She said studies funded by IES helped lead to the significant gains in completion rates over the past 15 years, with an emphasis on examining models that lead to the biggest improvements, like the Accelerated Study in Associate Programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) system.

“The next phase of the [completion] movement is really impacted by these cuts,” Engle said.

These research grants have also encouraged approximately half of states to reform their remedial education programs. She added that the ongoing push for colleges to improve their return on investment (ROI) for students was spurred by making earnings data public through the College Scorecard.

Anticipated Issues After ‘Reduction in Force’ Order

ED pulling the plug on IES isn’t likely to have an immediate impact.

Jordan Matsudaira, co-director at the Postsecondary Education & Economics Research (PEER) Center and former chief economist at ED, told BestColleges that issues are likely to build slowly. Institutions will continue to send data to the department, but without civil service workers, it’ll take longer and longer to analyze and finalize that data.

“Very little of that enterprise runs itself,” he said. “There are big risks that we’re either going to see delays or a dip in quality.”

What does a dip in quality look like?

Matsudaira said colleges and universities file elaborate spreadsheets to ED with thousands of data points. ED staff combs through the data to make sure elements aren’t misreported, as mistakes are prone to happen when working with such complex systems.

Those guardrails may now be gone.

“When there is nobody overseeing the process, a lot of those kinds of errors go uncaught,” he said. “The quality of the underlying data may suffer because there are not as many adults in the room.”

Brock, now the director of the Community College Research Center, added that this analysis is likely to become even more important in the coming months and years. Lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives are considering a massive overhaul of the higher education system, including the elimination of Grad PLUS loans and restricting eligibility for Pell Grants.

If those changes go through, it’ll be imperative to study their effects on students.

“We’re not going to know, quite honestly, if the changes the administration is putting into place are leading to improved or worse outcomes for students, or maybe have no effect at all,” Brock said. “It’s going to be a black box.”

Matsudaira shared the same concern

“When we’re making policy,” he said, “we’re going to be flying blind.”

Engle took those concerns one step further.

Without proper oversight, what’s to stop predatory institutions from purposefully submitting incorrect or misleading information? While accrediting agencies are tasked with overseeing institutions, she said those agencies largely rely on federal data in their analyses.

“There is a set of intuitions that will use numbers in an incorrect and predatory way,” she said.

Still, Engle said this is only a theoretical concern and remains unlikely for now. Brock and Matsudaira agreed that the legal consequences of blatant misreporting should continue to dissuade outright weaponization of false reports.

Is There a Solution in the States?

A common rationale for eliminating ED is to “return education to the states.”

Texas is one such state potentially equipped to carry the data burden that such a move may present. Expert after expert pointed to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board as a model for states in the U.S.

But, in many ways, it may be an outlier.

“Texas is much more data-mature than most states,” David Troutman, deputy commissioner for academic affairs at the Coordinating Board, told BestColleges. “When you’re more mature, you can withstand more hiccups.”

Troutman described decades of experience required to fine-tune Texas’ data system. The state has built different sites to house information most helpful to different target audiences: DataBridge is for administrators, for example, while My Texas Future is designed with students in mind.

It’s taken many years and different people to champion this effort and get Texas to this point.

“It’s about intention and making sure we have transparency,” he said. “We’re sitting on this Mount Everest of data; why would I sit on the mountain alone? I need climbers.”

The state’s data collection has led to concrete improvements for college students, Troutman said.

Texas noticed in its findings that there was a pocket of high-achieving, low-income students who were not going to college, he said. In response, the state created the Texas Leadership Scholars program, granting these students a full-ride scholarship to a Texas public university.

According to the Coordinating Board, the first two cohorts of Leadership Scholars posted persistence rates of 94% and 98% — well above the national average.

Brock said that while Texas is an exemplar, it’s not realistic to ask states to catch up to the state on such short notice.

“The rest of the country,” he said, “you just don’t have either the funding or the staff capacity.”

Cheng explained that federal data does a better job of painting a national picture than states can. Even two data-mature states may collect data in such a way that makes them incomparable, as each state collects information to meet its specific needs.

The federal government, meanwhile, collects data that serves broader purposes.

“There are no states that can fully replace that kind of consistency and transparency,” Cheng said.

Furthermore, even data-rich states like Texas depend on federal data. Troutman said the state’s Community College Finance model — which ties funding for community colleges to student outcomes — relies on IPEDS data. If there are gaps in IPEDS data, he’s unsure how the state would respond.

“It would cause a lot of issues,” he said. “We would have to recalibrate how we collect this data.”

What’s Next for Federal Education Data?

There is no clear picture of how the next few years at ED and IES will play out.

Numerous lawsuits have been filed to halt the proposed “dismantling” of ED.

In addition to the IHEP lawsuit to halt layoffs at IES, the American Educational Research Association and the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness co-filed another lawsuit in mid-April over the “unlawful dismantling” of IES. The National Academy of Education and the National Council on Measurement in Education co-filed yet another suit just 10 days later.

All three cases are ongoing.

Nevertheless, if Congress and the president decide to eliminate ED altogether, IES functions could move to other agencies. The Department of the Treasury is one potential option.

Matsudaira cautioned that such a move isn’t as easy as it may look.

When he started the office of Chief Economist at the department, he said he recruited an array of economists and academics to join his team. Despite having researched higher education finance systems for decades, Matsudaira said it took him and his team about a year to fully understand the complexity of ED’s data systems.

“It’s no trivial exercise for somebody unfamiliar with all the various data sets,” he said.

IES staff who would normally help train civil servants at other agencies have mostly been laid off, leaving many workers without the proper tools or expertise to understand a new assignment.

Cheng stressed that this loss of decades of institutional knowledge at ED also affects the department’s ability to improve data collection.

IPEDS staff helped tweak surveys to give institutions and policymakers a clearer picture of the higher education landscape, she said. For example, staff expertise led the department to develop a new student survey to better track outcomes and completion rates of part-time and transfer students.

ED was also expected to revise its data standards to better capture students of different races and ethnicities.

That initiative is now in doubt, Cheng said, much like the future of ED in general.