Advocates Warn of Risks to Higher Ed Data if Education Department is Shuttered

Even with the government shut down, lots of people are thinking about how to reimagine federal education research. Public comments on how to reform the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the Education Department’s research and statistics arm, were due on Oct. 15. A total of 434 suggestions were submitted, but no one can read them because the department isn’t allowed to post them publicly until the government reopens. (We know the number because the comment entry page has an automatic counter.)

A complex numbers game 

There’s broad agreement across the political spectrum that federal education statistics are essential. Even many critics of the Department of Education want its data collection efforts to survive — just somewhere else. Some have suggested moving the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to another agency, such as the Commerce Department, where the U.S. Census Bureau is housed.

But Diane Cheng, vice president of policy at the Institute for Higher Education Policy, a nonprofit organization that advocates for increasing college access and improving graduation rates, warns that shifting NCES risks the quality and usefulness of higher education data. Any move would have to be done carefully, planning for future interagency coordination, she said.

“Many of the federal data collections combine data from different sources within ED,” Cheng said, referring to the Education Department. “It has worked well to have everyone within the same agency.”

She points to the College Scorecard, the website that lets families compare colleges by cost, student loan debt, graduation rates, and post-college earnings. It merges several data sources, including the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), run by NCES, and the National Student Loan Data System, housed in the Office of Federal Student Aid. Several other higher ed data collections on student aid and students’ pathways through college also merge data collected at the statistical unit with student aid figures. Splitting those across different agencies could make such collaboration far more difficult.

“If those data are split across multiple federal agencies,” Cheng said, “there would likely be more bureaucratic hurdles required to combine the data.”

Information sharing across federal agencies is notoriously cumbersome, the very problem that led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11.

Hiring and $4.5 million in fresh research grants

Even as the Trump administration publicly insists it intends to shutter the Department of Education, it is quietly rebuilding small parts of it behind the scenes.

In September, the department posted eight new jobs to replace fired staff who oversaw the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the biennial test of American students’ achievement. In November, it advertised four more openings for statisticians inside the Federal Student Aid Office. Still, nothing is expected to be quick or smooth. The government shutdown stalled hiring for the NAEP jobs, and now a new Trump administration directive to form hiring committees by Nov. 17 to approve and fill open positions may further delay these hires.

At the same time, the demolition continues. Less than two weeks after the Oct. 1 government shutdown, 466 additional Education Department employees were terminated — on top of the roughly 2,000 lost since March 2025 through firings and voluntary departures. (The department employed about 4,000 at the start of the Trump administration.) A federal judge temporarily blocked these latest layoffs on Oct. 15.

There are also other small new signs of life. On Sept. 30 — just before the shutdown — the department quietly awarded nine new research and development grants totaling $4.5 million. The grants, listed on the department’s website, are part of a new initiative called, “From Seedlings to Scale Grants Program” (S2S), launched by the Biden administration in August 2024 to test whether the Defense Department’s DARPA-style innovation model could work in education. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, invests in new technologies for national security. Its most celebrated project became the basis for the internet.

Each new project, mostly focused on AI-driven personalized learning, received $500,000 to produce early evidence of effectiveness. Recipients include universities, research organizations and ed tech firms. Projects that show promise could be eligible for future funding to scale up with more students.

According to a person familiar with the program who spoke on background, the nine projects had been selected before President Donald Trump took office, but the formal awards were delayed amid the department’s upheaval. The Institute of Education Sciences — which lost roughly 90 percent of its staff — was one of the hardest hit divisions.

Granted, $4.5 million is a rounding error compared with IES’s official annual budget of $800 million. Still, these are believed to be the first new federal education research grants of the Trump era and a faint signal that Washington may not be abandoning education innovation altogether.

This story about risks to federal education data was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.