The federal government has long surveyed high schoolers to help track how their academic choices may have influenced the course of their lives. The Trump administration put an end to that effort.

It's the first Nation's Report Card since the Trump administration began making cuts to the U.S. Education Department. The scores reflect the state of student achievement in early 2024.

Niche researchers in a government-dependent education field are trying to pivot. “There are no crops coming out of this ground anymore.”

President Donald Trump wants to collect more admissions data from colleges and universities to make sure they’re complying with a 2023 Supreme Court decision that ended race-conscious affirmative action. And he wants that data now. But data experts and higher education scholars warn that any new admissions data is likely to be inaccurate, impossible to interpret and ultimately misused by policymakers. That’s because Trump’s own policies have left the statistics agency inside the Education Department with a skeleton staff and not enough money, expertise or time to create this new dataset.