Why Federal Data on Campus Sexual Assault Is Still Missing

In 2022, Congress passed a law requiring the Department of Education to start tracking incidents of sexual violence on all campuses that receive student aid. But the agency has yet to collect that comprehensive national data, and it’s unclear if or when it plans to do so. 

Now, as a high-profile gang-rape allegation at Cornell University draws renewed public attention to campus sexual violence, it’s putting a spotlight on the data the American government still fails to gather, which advocates say could help to improve prevention efforts. But Congress only put $1 million toward the nationwide campus climate survey, which experts say is nowhere near enough to fund such a significant undertaking.

Meanwhile, other efforts to document the prevalence of sexual misconduct in higher ed have been halted or scaled back. 

For instance, the Association of American Universities ceased its multicampus study, which was one of the broadest to date but included at most 33 institutions. The last edition was released in 2019. AAU has since said it ended the survey because of the federal one and doesn’t plan to restart it. A more recent 2024 survey from a group called Westat only included 10 institutions. 

Several colleges still voluntarily conduct their own campus climate surveys, and at least nine states—including New York, where Cornell is located—require one. And those survey results show that sexual violence continues to be a problem for students. Cornell’s 2025 campus climate survey showed a rise in the number of undergraduate women who said they experienced nonconsensual sexual contact (up from 23 percent in 2023 to 35 percent), though the response rate had dropped by more than half.

“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, the executive director of It’s On Us, a nonprofit dedicated to ending campus sexual assault. “It’s essentially just keeping with the status quo.”

Colleges already report certain incidents of sexual violence that happen on or near campus, as required by the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security and Campus Crime Statistics Act. But the Clery data doesn’t capture all incidents, only those crimes that are formally reported and happen on campus, in nearby university-related facilities, or in certain public spaces. Advocates argue that a new, more robust survey would provide the more granular data colleges need to better respond to the most common incidents and the highest-risk populations on their campus.

“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 said.

Others, like Joseph Storch, who serves as general counsel at Excelsior University and has pushed for campus climate surveys for more than a decade, say they understand both the demand for such a national survey and the obstacles preventing it.

“The promise of a national uniform survey is strong, but there would have to be good implementation,” he said. And without more federal resources, “that’s not a real possibility.”

Storch said he submitted a public records request for information on the status of the survey several years ago and never received anything in response. Inside Higher Ed reached out to the Education Department and several of the lawmakers who led the effort for an update on the survey, but none responded prior to publication.

An Understandable Delay

First introduced as part of legislation to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, the national campus climate survey on sexual violence was signed into law in 2022 as part of a sweeping omnibus budget bill. 

The legislation requires the department to “develop, design, and make available through a secure and accessible online portal, a standardized online survey tool.” After that, any college or university that receives federal student aid is required to conduct the survey and present results from a representative sample size of students every two years. By law, the survey has to be confidential and cannot include personally identifiable information. But it also has to include specific demographic information and detailed questions.

The first report was due to Congress in 2024. 

Some experts say the delay is understandable; the climate survey was designed to be one of the largest government surveys—second only to the decennial census. And while reports show that at least $1 million was designated for campus climate surveys, it remains unclear if that funding went to the Education Department or to the Department of Justice for a pre-existing grant program that backed individual campus surveys on sexual assault. 

“The Census Bureau is funded in the billions to conduct that survey every 10 years,” Storch said. “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’?

One higher education policy expert told Inside Higher Ed that a key reason the survey never truly got off the ground was because of how the bill was passed. 

Neither the House nor Senate education committee oversaw the bill that mandated the survey, the source explained. So, the lawmakers and staff involved might not have been as familiar with the logistical challenges of collecting such data. The need to discuss and address these challenges slipped through the cracks as higher education experts focused on other policy priorities.

“The higher ed community knew such a survey was in discussion. But it was tucked into the budget bill at the last minute,” said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject. 

Another higher ed policy expert who also asked to remain anonymous said that after the law passed, both the Education Department and some of the lawmakers who passed the bill realized “there was some sticky stuff with the wording.”

For instance, they explained, a number of institutions already conducted their own surveys. And while the legislation didn’t prevent them from asking their own questions along with those required under the Violence Against Women Act, adding them would defeat the purpose of a standardized national survey.

“Colleges started to ask if they could include their own questions specific to their campus,” she said. “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.”

Even more difficult than developing the survey, they said, would be figuring out how to administer it. There were concerns about whether smaller and less resourced universities would be able to create unique links for students and collect enough demographic data to ensure the sample was statistically representative of their campus while keeping the survey anonymous. It was also unclear what parts of the process would be ED’s responsibility and what would be up to the institutions.  

“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,” they said.

However, Vitchers from It’s on Us said the recent events at Cornell should remind the government why collecting campus climate data needs to be a high priority. 

“Frankly, without campus climate data, it’s really difficult to develop responsive prevention and education strategies in a strategic way,” she 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.”