Updates Required on Race in Education
A change in the way the federal government will report race and ethnicity data for educational institutions is making it necessary for the university to collect new information from students, faculty and staff.
Beginning in 2010, the U.S. Department of Education is moving away from the practice of classifying individuals by one racial category, and it is changing the way institutions report their data.
The most notable change in the Integrated Post-secondary Educational Data System (IPEDS) is a two-part question that first asks individuals to indicate if their ethnicity is Hispanic or Latino, before moving on to a second part that allows them to identify as more than one race.
While the new survey allows individuals to indicate more than one racial category, students applying for admissions under a revised application no longer will be able to self-identify using multi-ethnic or multi-racial labels of their own choosing, such as Burmese, Comanche or Jewish.
IPEDS tracks aggregate information about enrollment, program completion, graduation rates, faculty and staff, finances, institutional prices, and student financial aid from every college, university, and technical and vocational institution in the United States and other jurisdictions (such as Puerto Rico) that participate in the federal student financial aid programs. [EnerPub]
