- White House follows through on layoff threats
- AACC responds to IPEDS information request
- AACC joins ACE, AASCU in comments on IES restructuring
White House follows through on layoff threats
Last Friday evening, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Russell Vought, announced that the Executive Branch would begin executing Reduction in Force (RIF) plans across federal agencies.
As a reminder, OMB sent a memo to all agencies instructing them to prepare a Reduction in Force (RIF) plan for all non-essential staff ahead of a lapse in government funding. OMB directed agencies to permanently terminate – rather than simply furlough – those staff in the event of a shutdown. Per the memo, all employees who administer programs or activities that receive discretionary funding (and where that funding has lapsed) and where the program is not consistent with the President’s priorities would be subject to these RIFs.
This week, OMB began following through on this threat. Across the federal workforce, more than 4,200 workers have been terminated, including nearly 500 at the Department of Education (ED). The hardest hit offices include the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, and, importantly for community colleges, the Office of Postsecondary Education (OPE). OPE is tasked with overseeing and administering discretionary grant awards to colleges and universities, including federal TRIO grants and institutional aid awards. A former OPE employee told Inside Higher Ed that the Student Services office at OPE had been reduced from 40 staffers to just two or three.
This is the second time the Trump Administration has carried out widespread layoffs at the Department of Education. In March, Secretary Linda McMahon carried out a RIF that impacted every division and reduced agency staff by nearly half (from nearly 4,200 to less than 2,500). One of the offices most impacted by the March layoffs – the Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) – does not appear to have been hit by the most recent RIF.
On Wednesday, a federal judge temporarily halted the layoffs across the federal government. In a case filed by two unions representing government employees, a district court judge issued a temporary restraining order to pause the implementation of the RIFs and to block any future layoff notices from being issued. A second hearing to determine whether the layoffs will be blocked indefinitely will be held on October 28.
AACC responds to IPEDS information request
On Tuesday, the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) submitted formal comments responding to a Department of Education (ED) information collection request (ICR) on a proposed new admissions and financial aid data collection system, to be called the “Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement” (ACTS) survey.
The ACTS will require all 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, and parental education. The 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, disaggregated by test scores, GPA, family income, and type of admission (early action, early decision, or regular admissions). The ACTS will require end-of-year reporting on average cumulative GPA, cost of attendance, graduation rates, and graduates’ final GPA, again by race-sex pair and the same disaggregates. Finally, colleges will be expected to report data from the past five years to establish a baseline of admissions and aid practices before SFFA v. Harvard.
This represents a significant increase in both reporting to the federal government and, for community colleges, 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 what data minimization efforts will be taken to protect personally identifiable information for small, disaggregated cohorts.
The ICR states that open-access institutions, such as community colleges, “have minimal or no risk for civil rights noncompliance in admissions”, opening the door for community colleges to be exempt from the admissions components of the ACTS reporting. However, the ICR does request comments on whether open-enrollment institutions should still be required to report financial aid information to prove that they are not illegally considering race in the awarding of aid.
The AACC comments underscore that open-enrollment institutions are not at risk of engaging in unlawful preferential treatment in either admissions or in the awarding of aid. The comments ask the Department to exclude community colleges from the entirety of the ACTS reporting requirements. AACC also thanks its member colleges for submitting comments in support of the sector.
AACC joins ACE, AASCU in comments on IES restructuring
On Wednesday, the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) joined formal comments with the American Council on Education (ACE) and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) responding to a Request for Information (RFI) on how the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) can be reformed and improved. The comments ask the Department of Education (ED) to strengthen the quality and availability of data at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), maintain institutions’ involvement in developing data collection and reporting systems (such as Technical Review Panels), and support grantmaking at IES, emphasizing predictability in awards and the importance of peer review in grant evaluations.