IPEDS, ACTS and Federal Reporting for Institutional Research with AI

About this course

IPEDS reporting is now a year-round job: the standard IPEDS components, the new Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement (ACTS) with its record-level admissions data, and a program-level earnings accountability rule that takes effect on 2027-07-01. This course teaches institutional research offices and data stewards to assemble those files reproducibly, with every transformation logged and every number traceable to a source record, so a keyholder can defend the submission months later. You will map ACTS field definitions to your student information system, build a crosswalk and lineage sheet, design the audit trail, and run a sample extract through an AI agent that assembles and validates a file while a human keeps the submit button. The course is neutral on the litigation and exact about its status: a preliminary injunction issued on 2026-04-03 covers public universities in 17 states, and thousands of other institutions still must comply. Last verified 2026-09-28; the rules are still moving, and the course shows you how to track them.

What you will be able to do

1. State which institutions must report to IPEDS, the keyholder and coordinator roles, and the 2025-26 ACTS close dates (2026-03-18 for keyholders, 2026-04-01 for coordinators) from the NCES record.
2. Describe the ACTS litigation status as of 2026-09-28 (the 2026-04-03 preliminary injunction for public universities in 17 states, the later extension to hundreds more schools, and the thousands still covered) and locate the 2026-09-14 Federal Register notice that revises ACTS for 2026-27.
3. Build a field crosswalk from the ACTS survey instructions to SIS source fields, with a lineage entry and a data owner for every field.
4. Configure an AI agent that assembles a sample ACTS file, validates it and logs each transformation, and specify the boundary where a human takes over.
5. Design an audit trail that lets a keyholder reproduce any submitted figure from source records six months later.
6. Read the 2026-07-01 earnings-accountability final rule and extract the program-level test's definitions with section citations, and set up a monthly check of the Federal Register and court actions.

Who this course is for

Roles: institutional research directors and analysts; IPEDS keyholders and coordinators; registrars and admissions data leads who supply ACTS records; data stewards, data governance leads and campus IT staff who own the student information system extracts; general counsel's office staff who track the litigation.

Institutions: any institution that reports to IPEDS, with dedicated attention to public universities in the 17 states covered by the 2026-04-03 preliminary injunction and to the thousands of institutions that remain covered by ACTS.

Before you start: at least one IPEDS collection cycle completed in any role, familiarity with your SIS reporting extracts, and comfort reading a Federal Register notice. Spreadsheet skills. No coding.

Format

• Estimated time: 12 to 14 hours.
• Level: intermediate to advanced practitioner.
• Hands-on: a field-crosswalk worked example, an AI-agent lab that assembles and validates a sample ACTS extract, a rule-reading worked example on the earnings rule, three templates (crosswalk and lineage sheet, audit log, collection calendar), two discussions, and a capstone.
• Structure: 4 sections, each ending in an AI conversation assessment, then a capstone assessment.

Self-paced. Every lesson is taught by an AI tutor that opens with a short story and works through one idea and one question at a time. Each section ends with an AI conversation assessment, and the course closes with a capstone assessment. Section assessments count for 60% and the capstone for 40%; 70% passes. There are no multiple-choice quizzes.

Currency of this course

Last verified 2026-09-28. This is a regulatory course. The ACTS collection is under active litigation and the Department of Education re-noticed it for 2026-27 on 2026-09-14; the earnings-accountability rule takes effect on 2027-07-01. Dates and requirements below are correct as of the verification date and are re-checked monthly. Section 4.2 teaches learners how to track the changes themselves.