American higher education once guaranteed a path to economic success and financial security. Yet years of rising costs combined with minimal congressional oversight have led many students and policymakers to question whether college is still worth the investment, leading to considerations of cutting higher education data.

That’s why clamping down on good, publicly available higher education data will only worsen the problem — and send our university system and its students down a dark spiral.

After the Trump administration created the Department of Government Efficiency, it started arbitrarily cutting programs. The U.S. Department of Education has been gutted, leaving 1,900 fewer staff positions and a skeleton crew of only five at the office responsible for publishing education data on higher education outcomes.

Even worse, nearly $900 million in projects measuring educational efficiency and effectiveness have been canceled, severely compromising our country’s ability to conduct evaluations that schools, policymakers and researchers depend on to improve educational outcomes, demonstrating the potential impacts of cutting higher education data.

The inability to measure and publish data on college outcomes weakens the ability of the U.S. to maintain its global position as a leader in higher education at a time when international competition is intensifying. This threatens our domestic progress, and could trigger a decline in the very qualities that have made American higher education the envy of the world.

For four centuries, American colleges and universities have driven scientific and medical innovation, accelerated economic growth and created upward mobility for millions of people from low- and middle-income backgrounds. This success story is undeniable, but what was once taken for granted is now in question.

As early as 2006, a commission led by President George W. Bush’s Education Secretary Margaret Spellings warned that the United States was falling behind its global competitors. Other countries were educating a greater share of their citizens with advanced training.

The commission also stated that “more and better information on the quality and cost of higher education is needed by policymakers, researchers and the general public” in order to continuously improve.

Read the full article about higher education data by Michael Itzkowitz at The Hechinger Report.