Years after Congress mandated a sweeping federal effort to track sexual violence across American higher education, the U.S. Department of Education has yet to collect comprehensive national data, leaving a critical blind spot in the nation’s higher education system.
The ongoing inaction by the federal agency has drawn renewed public attention following high-profile allegations of gang rape at Cornell University. This incident and others like it have once again thrust the issue of campus safety and institutional accountability into the national spotlight, highlighting a persistent gap in the data that student advocates argue is essential for improving prevention efforts.
In 2022, lawmakers from both political parties supported and passed legislation requiring the Department of Education to begin tracking incidents of sexual violence at every college and university that receives federal student financial aid. The initiative was designed to standardize how institutions measure and report misconduct, giving federal regulators, school administrators, and the public a clearer picture of safety on campuses nationwide. However, the agency has yet to pull together that comprehensive data, and it remains entirely unclear if or when it plans to fulfill the congressional mandate.
The shortfall is partly financial. Congress allocated only $1 million toward the nationwide campus climate survey, an amount that policy experts and higher education administrators say is nowhere near sufficient for a project of this magnitude. Meanwhile, as the federal government struggles to get its initiative off the ground, other independent efforts to document the prevalence of sexual misconduct in higher education have been scaled back or halted altogether.
The Association of American Universities previously operated one of the broadest multicampus studies on the subject, though it capped participation at a maximum of 33 institutions. The final edition of the AAU survey was released in 2019. Since then, the association has stated that it ended the initiative because of the anticipated federal survey and has no plans to restart it. A more recent effort in 2024 by an independent research group called Westat included only 10 institutions, underscoring a broader contraction in reliable data collection.
Despite the absence of a unified federal tracking system, several individual colleges continue to voluntarily conduct their own campus climate surveys. Furthermore, at least nine states—including New York, where Cornell is located—now require public and private institutions to administer these assessments.
The results from these localized surveys consistently show that sexual violence remains a pervasive challenge for students. For instance, Cornell’s 2025 campus climate survey revealed a notable increase in the proportion of undergraduate women who reported experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact, climbing from 23 percent in 2023 to 35 percent, although the campus response rate dropped by more than half over the same period.
"Outside of institutions that are electing to continue to do campus climate surveys and publish that data for the general public’s consumption, it’s unclear exactly what the incidence rates are across campuses nationwide," said Tracey Vitchers, executive director of It’s On Us, a national nonprofit dedicated to ending campus sexual assault. "It’s essentially just keeping with the status quo."
Colleges are already legally mandated to report certain incidents of sexual violence that occur on or near their properties under the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security and Campus Crime Statistics Act. However, Clery Act data captures only a fraction of the reality. It is limited strictly to crimes that are formally reported to campus security or local law enforcement and that happen directly on campus, within university-related residential facilities, or in specific public zones adjacent to campus.
Advocates argue that a robust, standardized federal survey would provide the granular, behind-the-scenes data colleges urgently need to tailor their prevention programs, target high-risk populations, and respond more effectively to the most common forms of misconduct.
"Particularly in this current Title IX climate, we recognize that many students are either choosing not to report because there’s multiple barriers to entry or they may be seeking an alternative resolution process," Vitchers noted.
Other veterans of campus safety policy, such as Joseph Storch, general counsel at Excelsior University, understand both the intense demand for a national survey and the formidable administrative obstacles that have prevented its realization. Storch has advocated for campus climate assessments for more than a decade.
"The promise of a national uniform survey is strong, but there would have to be good implementation," he said. Without a significant infusion of federal resources, "that’s not a real possibility."
Storch noted that he submitted a formal public records request years ago seeking an update on the status of the Education Department’s survey and never received a response. Representatives from Inside Higher Education reached out to the Department of Education and several congressional offices that spearheaded the legislation to request an update, but none provided comments prior to publication.
An Understandable Delay
The national campus climate survey originated as a provision within broader legislation aimed at reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. It was ultimately signed into law in 2022 as part of a sweeping, last-minute omnibus federal budget bill.
The statutory language requires the Department of Education to develop, design, and host a standardized online survey tool through a secure and accessible portal. Once operational, every college and university receiving federal student aid is required to administer the survey to a representative sample of its student body every two years. The legislation mandates that individual responses remain strictly confidential, prohibiting the inclusion of personally identifiable information while still requiring detailed demographic breakdowns and specific inquiry categories.
Under the original timeline, the first comprehensive report was due to be delivered to Congress in 2024.
Some policy analysts argue that the subsequent delays are understandable given the unprecedented scale of the undertaking. The federal survey was designed to encompass tens of millions of students across thousands of institutions, making it potentially one of the largest government surveys executed outside of the decennial census. Yet while public reports indicate that $1 million was designated for campus climate surveys, it remains ambiguous whether those funds were ever directed to the Education Department or channeled instead to a pre-existing Department of Justice grant program that supports individual campus-level initiatives.
"The Census Bureau is funded in the billions to conduct that survey every 10 years," Storch pointed out. "The Department of Education has either zero funding or maybe some share of $1 million to conduct a survey of tens of millions of college students at thousands of institutions."
Sticky Wording or Excuses?
According to higher education policy experts who spoke on the condition of anonymity, another primary reason the federal survey failed to launch is rooted in the legislative mechanics of how the bill was passed.
Because the measure was tucked into a massive omnibus budget package at the eleventh hour, it bypassed the traditional oversight of the House and Senate education committees. As a result, the lawmakers and staff members driving the legislation may not have been fully attuned to the complex logistical hurdles involved in gathering uniform national data on sensitive topics across diverse institutional types.
Furthermore, once the law took effect, officials at both the Department of Education and among lawmakers recognized complications arising from the phrasing of the statute.
Many institutions had already established their own campus climate surveys tailored to local demographics and institutional cultures. While the legislation did not technically bar schools from asking supplemental questions alongside the federally mandated ones, doing so would undermine the core objective of a standardized national assessment.
"Colleges started to ask if they could include their own questions specific to their campus," one policy expert explained. "The answer was yes. But that makes the survey tool different, and if the tool is different from campus to campus, then the results can’t be statistically comparable."
Logistical complications multiplied when considering how the survey would actually be administered. Questions arose regarding whether smaller, resource-constrained institutions possessed the technological capacity to generate secure student links, protect anonymity, and achieve statistically representative response rates without violating privacy laws. It also remained poorly defined which administrative responsibilities fell to the Education Department versus individual campuses.
"The department, during both the Biden and Trump eras, has seemed to throw their hands up and say it would be very difficult and perhaps impossible," the expert added.
Despite these administrative hurdles, advocates maintain that recent events, such as the outcry at Cornell, serve as a stark reminder of why national data collection must remain a top-tier federal priority.
"Frankly, without campus climate data, it’s really difficult to develop responsive prevention and education strategies in a strategic way," Vitchers said. "When we hear explanations from institutions that this is a burden or too much of a challenge, I find that excuse unacceptable, because there should be no excuse to having the best data available to ensure a campus that is free from sexual violence."
