The ACTS Report and Upcoming Changes to ISIRs

Upcoming changes to ISIRs

An upcoming mid-cycle change to the ISIR layout will be implemented on April 26, 2026 in order to accommodate several changes from the OBBBA, including the addition of a new Workforce Pell Grant indicator and new annual, aggregate, and lifetime loan limit fields. Populi is already hard at work updating our systems so that you can continue to download ISIRs without interruption.

ACTS Reporting Tool

We’ve released our initial version of the Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement (ACTS) reporting tool in Academics > Reporting > Preset. To access the report, a user needs both the Financial Aid role and any of these roles: Academic Admin, Registrar, Academic Auditor. The report is due March 18, 2026.

According to IPEDS, the goal of the new report is to “expand the scope of information collected about the undergraduate and graduate admissions process, financial aid awarding process, enrollment in courses and programs, and outcomes and completions in order to comply with the Secretary of Education’s directive that followed the August 7, 2025 Ensuring Transparency in Higher Education Admissions Executive Memorandum.“

Because the timeframe from announcement to release of technical specifications to deadline has been so short, this initial version of the reporting tool does not provide all of the information required by ACTS. Our goal with this version was to extract the difficult-to-find data like ISIR fields and annual financial aid sums from your Populi database. (Future versions of the tool will fill in the remaining gaps.) The current tool’s purpose is to provide you with an excess of data so you can export CSV and delete rows, or use our export data to fill in columns on spreadsheets that you are compiling from other data sources or Populi reports.

The first reporting cycle collects seven years of data with four different reports for each year. The data must be submitted year-by-year in a spreadsheet to an IPEDS aggregator/validator site before final data is downloaded and resubmitted in final form. Populi’s ACTS tool provides both Preview (that is, human-readable) and Exportable (formatted according to their codebooks) data that you can review and then copy-paste into the appropriate sections of the seven reporting templates.

Please note that the final version of the templates is not supposed to include any personal identifiers. The Populi data exports includes names and student id on our exports so you can compare our data with data you may have already collected. Please do not copy any of the identifiers into the final report templates!

The majority of this data is based on admissions application data. If your school does not use Populi Admissions, the tool has an “All” option for Academic Terms which returns all students with aid applications in the selected aid year so that ISIR and financial aid data can be retrieved.