Good morning, and welcome to Wednesday, February 12. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.

What gets measured gets managed

The Trump administration’s spending hacksaw has come for the U.S. Department of Education’s data apparatus, as our Katherine Mangan reports.

Dozens of contracts with the Education Department’s research and statistics arm have been suddenly terminated. Contractors for the Institute of Education Sciences received emails on Monday telling them to stop work. The Trump administration moved to terminate 169 contracts within the institute, according to the American Educational Research Association and the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics.

The terminations come after Elon Musk’s government-efficiency effort swept into the department. Musk’s team has been very publicly performing its work.

That could disrupt key data from the National Center for Education Statistics, which tracks indicators like graduation rates, transfer rates, student demographics, and tuition rates.

• NCES is required by Congress to collect data from pre-kindergarten through college and work-force training. It relies on contractors to bolster its thin staff counts.

“This is an incredible waste of taxpayer dollars,” Dana Tofig, an American Institutes for Research spokesperson, said in an email. “The evaluation and data work that has been terminated is exactly the work that determines which programs are effective uses of federal dollars, and which are not.”

Worries run high about the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. The research group that collects IPEDS data didn’t have its contract terminated, according to AERA. But the group is concerned that contracts for analyzing and reporting on the data have been affected.

None of this is sexy. But it’s important. Policymakers, researchers, and families alike use IPEDS data.

• IPEDS is a treasure trove of information reported by institutions that receive federal student aid. It’s part of the foundation of how we understand higher education at a national level — a collection of information on the likes of enrollment, spending metrics, and student outcomes. Tenured professors use it when they research higher ed. So do students when they compare colleges they might attend.

The bigger picture: Federal education data is far from perfect — your Daily Briefing scribe has long argued essential financial information takes too long to arrive in an age when colleges’ balance sheets can deteriorate quickly, for example. But interrupting these functions without notice risks making it harder to understand if students are learning. And it could very well obfuscate our understanding of whether colleges and the government are putting public dollars to good use.

📱 Read the full story: Education Data in the Lurch as Dozens of Department Contracts Are Axed

Trump news dump

• Judge blocks NIH cap nationwide: Judge Angel Kelley of the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts granted a temporary restraining order in response to a lawsuit led by the Association of American Medical Colleges, telling the National Institutes of Health not to “take any steps to implement, apply, or enforce” the sudden 15-percent cap on overhead funding that threatens to drain billions from research budgets. It’s the second such order after Kelley acted on a request in a separate lawsuit, stopping the Trump administration from implementing the cap in 22 states while legal challenges unfold. In light of the court orders, research institutions resumed submitting NIH grant proposals they’d stopped after the cap was announced late Friday. (The Chronicle)
• Agencies ordered to restore websites: Judge John Bates of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., issued a temporary restraining order telling the government to reverse its takedown of several sites and datasets that the advocacy group Doctors for America alleges were removed without adequate notice or explanation to comply with Trump’s executive orders. In a lawsuit, the group cited a Yale School of Medicine doctor who uses Centers for Disease Control resources about contraceptives and sexually transmitted infections, arguing that removing information from such websites harms patient care and research. (STAT)
• Education Department tells NCAA to strip trans athletes’ records: The U.S. Department of Education on Tuesday called for the NCAA and National Federation of State High School Associations to “restore to female athletes the records, titles, awards, and recognitions misappropriated by biological males competing in female categories.” The department cited Riley Gaines, who launched a prominent campaign against trans athletes after she tied for fifth place in a 2022 swimming championship. The Trump administration is pressing its case after the NCAA last week responded to an executive order by banning trans athletes from women’s sports. (U.S. Department of Education, The Chronicle)

Stat of the day

11.2 percent

That’s the average college endowment’s net return last year, according to a new study from the National Association of College and University Business Officers and Commonfund.

Endowments had a good year in 2024, outperforming the prior year, when returns averaged 7.7 percent.

Returns over the past three years are much lower, averaging just 3.4 percent. Three-year returns were dragged down by a particularly bad year in 2022. Returns averaged 8.3 percent over five years, 8.2 percent over 15 years, and 6.1 percent over 25 years.

Smaller endowments did better than large ones last year. Institutions with endowments valued at less than $50 million posted a 13-percent average return, compared to a 9.1-percent average for endowments over $5 billion.

• Colleges with small endowments tend to skew their investments more heavily toward public equities, which did well last year. Large endowments, on the other hand, invest more heavily in alternative strategies that backers say tend to do better over longer time periods.

But a relatively small number of colleges continue to hold almost all of the assets. This year’s study drew responses from 658 colleges that reported endowments worth a collective $874 billion. A whopping 86 percent of that total is held by just 144 colleges that have more than $1 billion in endowed assets.

• The median endowment was worth $234.1 million.

The bigger picture: This year’s strong investment performance is good for colleges as they seek to maintain endowments’ spending power over time, so they can keep paying for priorities like instruction and research. But high returns and wealth concentration at the top won’t help higher ed fight off proposed expansions of the federal endowment tax.

Quick hits

• Quarter of students say new FAFSA was hard: Twenty-five percent of people who submitted the Free Application for Federal Student Aid for the 2024-25 academic year said the process of filling out the overhauled form was somewhat or very difficult, according to polling conducted in October. Slightly more than half of respondents said when they received their financial-aid offers affected where and whether they went to college. But that may understate difficulties during last year’s botched FAFSA rollout, because the survey results don’t include students who didn’t finish the form or who opted not to even start it. (Lumina Foundation-Gallup 2025 State of Higher Education Study, The Chronicle)
• Lt. Gov. Jim Tressel? Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, chose the former Ohio State University football coach to replace Jon Husted, who assumed JD Vance’s former U.S. Senate seat. Tressel, 72, left Ohio State in 2011 amid a scandal over impermissible player benefits, then became president of Youngstown State University from 2014 to 2023. Lawmakers must still approve the choice, which comes as Republicans jostle to run to succeed the term-limited DeWine. (The Columbus Dispatch, The Chronicle)
• K-12 scorecard a warning for colleges: The average American student’s math and reading scores trailed pre-pandemic norms by half a grade level last spring, according to an effort from university researchers to track learning loss and recovery. Though results varied widely by school district, high-income districts were almost four times more likely to have recovered in math and reading scores than were low-income districts. The group is pushing for efforts to help students catch up, but its work is another reminder that colleges may have to prepare to recruit and enroll those who have been set back academically. (Education Recovery Scorecard)
• Bowdoin protesters leave building: Pro-Palestinian activists left Smith Union on Monday evening, four days after setting up an encampment in the building to try to push the college to denounce the Israeli government and swear off investments in weapons manufacturers. One organizer said that administrators agreed to consider protesters’ good-faith discussions during disciplinary processes, even though the college didn’t commit to meeting demands. Eight students reportedly received suspension notices, down from earlier estimates of 15. (Portland Press Herald)

Comings and goings

• William M. Downs, president of Gardner-Webb University, has been named president of Campbell University.
• Paula Lancaster has been named provost and executive vice president at Central Michigan University, after serving as interim provost since last fall.
• Tom Evelyn, vice president for university communications at Furman University, has been named vice president for strategic communications and marketing at Trinity University, in Texas.

To submit a new-hire announcement, email people@chronicle.com.

Footnote

What’s worse than the indignity of losing the fantasy football league where you play against your college buddies? Losing the league and then becoming internet-famous because the punishment for coming in last was walking 26.2 miles in the dining hall.

That was the fate of Cole Bray, a sophomore at Wake Forest University, in North Carolina. He recently went the distance by completing 600 figure-eights around a university cafeteria nicknamed “The Pit.”

Bray walked it all in one day, starting shortly before 9 a.m. and finishing at 6:30 p.m. He took breaks, but nonetheless said ankle pain prompted him to debate throwing in the towel around mile 24.

Runners are nodding. Any marathoner will tell you the last 10-k is harder than the first 20 miles.

Some marathoners turn to caffeine, while others count on cheers from spectators for that little boost of energy to power them down the stretch. Bray’s experience in the dining hall was … slightly different.

“For the last lap, everyone stood up and started clapping,” Bray told the Old Gold & Black, Wake Forest’s student newspaper. “It honestly kind of felt like ‘the pity clap’ for whoever finishes last in a track meet. Everyone was telling me to jog the last one. The whole thing was kind of ridiculous.”

The league is considering turning the “Pit Marathon” into a charity event. Losing for a good cause would be a wonderful way to serve up a little dignity for future last-place teams.