After the 2022 midterm election, a gap appeared to be shrinking on U.S. college campuses.
The turnout rate for student voters at community colleges was catching up with the rate at public four-year institutions, data suggested. What was a gap of 9 percentage points for the 2020 election had shrunk to just 3 in 2022.
"This told us that we needed to be doing more to support community colleges in their efforts to engage their students," says Clarissa Unger, executive director of the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition, a nonpartisan network focused on boosting civic engagement on campuses.
"We would love to be able to see the 2024 data to see if those extra efforts to support community colleges did help [fully] close that gap," Unger adds.
But that data is now on ice.
In March, researchers at Tufts University announced that they've halted releasing statistics from the go-to source of school-level data on student voter registration and turnout — the National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement. And the key source of student information needed to produce NSLVE reports, the National Student Clearinghouse, pulled out of working on the study going forward, after a more than decade-long partnership.
It's all part of the fallout from an extraordinary investigation into the study by the Trump administration's Education Department.
In a press release touting it as a move to "protect" the integrity of U.S. elections, Trump officials said they launched the probe in February to look into unspecified "reports" that NSLVE is in violation of a federal student data privacy law.
Many privacy experts, however, are skeptical of the accusations, which echo claims first raised by right-wing election activists.
Both Tufts University and the National Student Clearinghouse maintain they have not violated the privacy law. A Tufts statement emphasizes that NSLVE, which started in 2013, is a nonpartisan study "that seeks to understand whether students vote, not who they vote for."
Still, school administrators and other student voting advocates tell NPR they're already feeling the impact of the Trump administration's investigation in a midterm election year. The loss of data from new NSLVE reports has left the over 1,000 colleges and universities that participate in the study in the dark, as they try to figure out how to increase turnout among the voting-age cohort that is least likely to cast ballots in the United States.
A focus of right-wing election activists became an Education Department probe
So far, the Education Department has not identified the source of what it described as "multiple reports alleging that the process of compiling NSLVE data involves illegally sharing college students' data with third parties to influence elections."
The department's press office declined to comment to NPR.
But Cleta Mitchell — a Republican election lawyer who took part in President Trump's failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election — revealed a backstory during an online meeting of right-wing election activists in March.
In 2023, a fellow activist named Heather Honey, Mitchell explained, posted online a document she wrote about NSLVE. It claims that colleges and universities appear to violate the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act when they give the National Student Clearinghouse permission to share their student enrollment records for the study. The document also raises suspicion about Catalist, a Democratic-aligned data firm that was once involved with the study. The firm compiles public voter records from states and previously gave them to the clearinghouse to match with student information.
Tufts has maintained that its study is designed to comply with the privacy law.
Last year, Honey was appointed as the deputy assistant secretary for elections integrity at the Department of Homeland Security.
"One of the things that she did was send over her report and a proposal to the Department of Education — to Linda McMahon, the secretary of education — to say, 'You've got to stop this,' " Mitchell said in a recording of the meeting uploaded by a group called Pure Integrity Michigan Elections.
Mitchell went on to describe the National Student Clearinghouse's decision to stop its work on NSLVE as "100% the result of the work" of Honey and activists in Michigan.
"And so that's a real victory lap and one that I think we ought to celebrate," Mitchell added.
Mitchell and Catalist did not respond to NPR's inquiries. Honey referred questions to DHS' public affairs office, which said in an unsigned statement to NPR: "Heather Honey has not had involvement with the Department of Education's investigation. Her 2023 report is PUBLIC."
Brendan Fischer, who tracks the far-right election activist movement, sees Mitchell's comments as the latest connection between the activists and the Trump administration.
"This really shows the power and influence that a network of election conspiracy theorists are having over government policy and over the way that elections are run and civic participation is studied," says Fischer, the director of strategic investigations at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan voting rights group.
Since the 2020 election, Mitchell and other activists have built a grassroots network that's often attacked efforts to encourage voting among populations that they perceive support the Democratic Party. During the March meeting of Michigan activists, Mitchell criticized efforts to boost student participation in elections as attempts to "really gin up the Democratic turnout on college campuses."
On the same day as Mitchell's comments, another opponent of NSLVE publicly hailed the end of the National Student Clearinghouse's involvement with the study — the America First Policy Institute, a right-wing think tank set up by former members of the first Trump administration, including McMahon, the current education secretary.
"AFPI is encouraged that students are finally being protected," said Anna Pingel, a campaign director at the think tank, in a statement that called the development "an important step toward ensuring that sensitive student data is not exploited for political purposes." The statement also said that AFPI sent a letter to the Education Department earlier this year with concerns about NSLVE and potential violations of student data privacy protections.
Fischer at the Campaign Legal Center — whose attorneys have filed multiple lawsuits against the Trump administration — points out that Trump officials are investigating NSLVE at the same time the administration faces multiple legal challenges to its murky handling of people's data, including state voter registration, Social Security and IRS records.
"There is a certain irony in the Trump administration repeatedly violating privacy laws and then turning around and shutting down this program studying college student participation in democracy, by arguing that it may have violated federal privacy law," Fischer says.
Colleges face tough decisions about whether and how to promote student voting
The Education Department in February sent a guidance letter to colleges and universities that advises school administrators to hold off on using "any NSLVE report or data this year" until the department's investigation is complete. The letter mentions the "number of enforcement options" the department could use against schools that are found to violate privacy law, including withholding or clawing back federal funding.
Amanda Fuchs Miller, who served as deputy assistant secretary for higher education programs at the Education Department during the Biden administration, sees the move as a "scare tactic."
"It's very unusual to send out a letter like that when there are no findings and nobody is found to have done anything wrong," Miller says. "A lot of these schools are small schools, community colleges, under-resourced institutions that may not have a general counsel's office to figure out what this means. And if they get this letter and they think it's putting them at risk, their Title IV funds at risk, their federal financial aid for students at risk, this [study] would be the first to go, which would be an understandable immediate reaction if you don't know what it really means."
Before the current Trump administration, the department has historically kept its data privacy investigations off the public's radar to try to encourage schools to more quickly correct any violations, explains Amelia Vance, a student data privacy expert who leads the Public Interest Privacy Center.
"It's really unusual to have these investigations talked about, announced, confirmed across the board," Vance says.
And if there are indeed any violations, the department could try to find ways to allow for the study to continue because, Vance adds, "the way the law was written, it gives a ton of discretion to the Department of Ed in order to allow for flexibility."
But for now, Melissa Michelson — dean of arts and sciences at Menlo College, a Hispanic-serving and Asian American, Native American and Pacific Islander-serving institution in California's Silicon Valley that has participated in NSLVE — says many school administrators are bracing for potential tough decisions.
"I'm a political scientist and I believe strongly that everybody should vote," says Michelson, whose research focuses on voter mobilization. "But if I have to choose between being financially responsible and ensuring that Menlo College can stay open because our students can receive Pell Grants or continuing to participate in NSLVE and getting this data to inform our civic engagement coalition, I'm going to pick financial responsibility every time."
And in the middle of a midterm election year, schools that do decide to carry out their plans to mobilize student voters will be forging ahead with out-of-date data.
"That's troubling because for most schools, this is an iterative learning process," Michelson says. "You do something in one year, you get your data back and you see, 'Hey, what looks different? Did we get better in getting out the vote among our male first-year students? How are we doing with those business majors?' Without feedback from what they did in 2024, it makes it more challenging for schools to decide what to do in 2026."
The NSLVE investigation is not the first time colleges have struggled with Trump administration guidance on student voter registration
Miller, the former Biden official, notes that many college administrators were already having a hard time interpreting earlier guidance from the Trump administration on student voter registration.
Last August, the Education Department issued a letter saying that to avoid "aiding and abetting voter fraud," schools "may limit the list of recipients" when distributing mail voter registration forms so students who schools have reason to believe aren't eligible to vote aren't included. Federal law, however, requires certain higher education institutions participating in federal student aid programs to "make a good faith effort" to distribute forms "to each student enrolled in a degree or certificate program and physically in attendance at the institution, and to make such forms widely available to students at the institution."
The same letter also said schools cannot use federal work-study funding to employ students to help register voters or assist at the polls. But the department's Federal Student Aid Handbook does not include that restriction for students employed by schools for on-campus work.
"This has caused lots of confusion for schools and a chilling effect in doing critical work that promotes voting among college students," Miller says.
A group of Senate Democrats led by Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey has asked the Education Department to reconsider its August guidance, which they say "undermines decades of bipartisan recognition that encouraging voter registration is a core public interest function of institutions of higher education."
Edited by Benjamin Swasey
Copyright 2026 NPR
