The IPEDS ACTS lawsuit is a challenge brought by 17 state attorneys general against the U.S. Department of Education’s new Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement to IPEDS, and a federal judge in Massachusetts has blocked the survey for public colleges in those states and for roughly 178 institutions represented by higher education associations that joined the case. Every other four-year institution covered by the survey, more than 2,000 schools, must still comply.
Who Is Covered by the Injunction
The April 24, 2026 preliminary injunction from Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV bars the Department of Education from enforcing any ACTS compliance deadline against two groups of institutions.
The first group is public colleges and universities in the 17 plaintiff states: Massachusetts, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.
The second group is the member institutions of 12 intervenor-plaintiffs, about 178 schools in total. That includes all U.S. members of the Association of American Universities (69 research universities, both public and private), members of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts, the Connecticut Conference of Independent Colleges, the Maine Independent Colleges Association, North Carolina Independent Colleges and Universities, the Oregon Alliance of Independent Colleges and Universities, and a separate group made up of Barnard College, Bryn Mawr College, Middlebury College, Sarah Lawrence College, Swarthmore College, and Vassar College.
Covered institutions still have one continuing obligation: they must preserve any data that would be responsive to the survey in case the legal picture changes.
Who Still Has to File
Everyone else. The court expressly declined to block the survey nationwide, citing the Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in Trump v. CASA, Inc., which limits district courts’ authority to issue universal injunctions. Relief was confined to the parties in the case.
That leaves more than 2,000 four-year institutions with selective admissions subject to ACTS. Private colleges that are not members of an intervenor association, public universities in the 33 states that did not sue, and any other covered school outside the two protected groups remain on the hook. For those institutions, the survey requirement is in full force, along with the potential consequences: fines of up to $71,545 per violation and possible loss of Title IV federal funding eligibility.
As of the most recent court filings, the Department of Education had not actually levied fines or taken enforcement action against any institution. But the presidential memorandum that created the survey directs the Secretary of Education to “take remedial action” against submissions deemed incomplete or inaccurate, and the court found that risk real enough to constitute irreparable harm for the schools it did protect.
The National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities filed an amicus brief rather than intervening, and had been publicly exploring ways to extend protection to all private nonprofit institutions, but no such expansion has been reported.
What ACTS Actually Requires
ACTS is an addition to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System that traces back to a presidential memorandum signed by President Donald Trump on August 7, 2025, titled “Ensuring Transparency in Higher Education Admissions.” The memorandum directed the Secretary of Education to expand IPEDS data collection within 120 days, with the stated purpose of determining whether colleges were still using race-based preferences after the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
The survey applies to roughly 2,200 four-year institutions with selective admissions. It requires disaggregated data on applications, admissions, enrollment, and financial aid, broken down by race-sex pairings, GPA and test score quintiles, family income ranges, Pell eligibility, parental education level, and application round. Graduate and professional programs must be reported by field of study. The collection is retroactive, covering seven academic years from 2019 through 2026.
The Department of Education estimated each institution would need about 200 hours to comply, more than twice the burden of every other IPEDS survey combined. The collection window opened on December 18, 2025, with an original close date of March 18, 2026.
What the Court Ruled
Judge Saylor’s April 3, 2026 preliminary injunction for the state plaintiffs, and the April 24 order extending it to the intervenor groups, rested on the Administrative Procedure Act. The court found the states and intervenors were likely to succeed on their claim that the rollout was “arbitrary and capricious.”
The judge described the implementation as “rushed and chaotic” and said the 120-day deadline in the presidential memorandum “led directly to the failure of NCES to engage meaningfully with the institutions.” The Department discarded its longstanding Technical Review Panel process, which normally provides peer review of new IPEDS instruments, solely to hit the deadline. The court found the agency failed to adequately address concerns about administrative burden, student privacy, and whether institutions even had the requested data.
The court rejected one theory the plaintiffs raised. Judge Saylor concluded the states were not likely to succeed on their Paperwork Reduction Act claim, holding that the PRA requires an agency to certify compliance and provide a supporting record, not that a court independently verify every substantive requirement.
When the government argued that institutions which had already submitted data no longer faced harm, the court disagreed. Because the survey lacked clear definitions and consistent reporting standards, every covered institution faced an ongoing risk of submitting “inconsistent and inaccurate data” and then being penalized for it. That “imminent, non-speculative risk of fines and loss of funding” was enough to support relief across the covered institutions.
How the Case Reached This Point
The 17 state attorneys general filed Massachusetts v. U.S. Department of Education in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts on March 11, 2026. They named the Department of Education, Secretary Linda McMahon, the Office of Management and Budget, and OMB Director Russell Vought as defendants, and raised claims under the Administrative Procedure Act, the Paperwork Reduction Act, the E-Government Act, and statutory neutrality mandates that require the National Center for Education Statistics and the Institute of Education Sciences to be objective and nonpartisan.
The case moved quickly. On March 13, two days after filing, Judge Saylor issued a temporary restraining order pushing the survey deadline from March 18 to March 25. The Department applied that extension to all institutions. The court then narrowed the TRO to public institutions in the 17 plaintiff states, and the Department set a new deadline of March 31 for everyone else, with an option to request an extension to April 8 by uploading at least three years of data by the original cutoff.
Private institutions moved to protect themselves. The Association of American Universities and the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts filed motions to intervene on March 25. The court provisionally granted them on March 31 and issued TROs extending the deadline for their members through April 14. On April 7, five more groups were provisionally admitted, including the Independent College Group of six liberal arts institutions. After an April 13 hearing, the TROs for all intervenors were extended through April 24, when Judge Saylor issued the broader preliminary injunction.
Where Things Stand Now
The preliminary injunction remains in effect for the 17 plaintiff states’ public institutions and the roughly 178 institutions represented by the intervenor-plaintiffs. It will stay in place until the court issues a final order on the merits or a higher court overturns it. No appeal to the First Circuit has been reported in the available record.
For institutions outside the covered groups, no new deadlines or enforcement actions have been publicly announced, but the underlying obligation has not been lifted. Schools in that position are still expected to file, and the Department retains the authority the memorandum gave it to pursue remedial action against submissions it considers incomplete or inaccurate. Whether a broader remedy eventually reaches them will depend on further rulings, additional intervenors, or a merits decision in the Massachusetts case.