What The College Transparency Act May Mean for Higher Ed

Dr. Robert Kelchen, professor of higher education at the University of Tennessee KnoxvilleLast week, the U.S. House of Representatives approved the long-awaited, bipartisan College Transparency Act (CTA) as an amendment to the America COMPETES Act, a larger bill that the House passed and now awaits Senate approval.

Experts and advocates stress that the CTA would gather more comprehensive student data, including by race, to better identify inequities and close those gaps.

“Right now, we have student outcome information only for limited groups—and that’s because we have federal data limitations,” said Dr. Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. “For example, in the College Scorecard tool, we can have information about post-college earnings by family income or if you’re a first-generation graduate. But we don’t have information about earnings or student loan debt by race.”

This data blind spot makes it harder to ensure higher education is serving all students fairly and equitably, added Kelchen. But CTA would instead require colleges and universities to collect and file data to the U.S. Department of Education (ED) on student enrollment, transfer, persistence, and completion across all programs and degrees. The data would also be disaggregated by demographics, such as race and ethnicity, gender, and age.

“This bill is as American as apple pie,” said Craig Lindwarm, vice president for governmental affairs at the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), a research, policy, and advocacy organization dedicated to public universities in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. “It is about the transparency that should be expected in this country to ensure students and families are informed about colleges and universities.”

Under the CTA, ED would additionally share limited data at times with other federal agencies, such as the Internal Revenue Service. This data would be used to calculate postgraduate outcomes, including earnings and career prospects.

The CTA has been attached to the America COMPETES Act, which would allocate billions of dollars to bolster U.S. research to compete with China, particularly in STEM. But the Senate’s version of the COMPETES Act does not include the CTA provisions.