Simplifying Federal Change: How Liaison Supports Compliance and Adaptation

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Overview

Liaison is committed to supporting you as you navigate evolving legal and regulatory landscapes. This article provides guidance on how Liaison's products can support your institution's approach to recent legislative changes.

As institutional polices and legal interpretations continue to develop, this resource will be updated to reflect current best practices and platform capabilities.

Liaison's Products

Liaison's suite of portals works together to help you collect and manage applications. The CAS application, also referred to as the CAS Applicant Portal, is the system where applicants find and apply to your programs. You then receive and manage these applications in one or some of the systems below; click on the links below to navigate to the product's help center for step-by-step instructions, videos, and best practices.

API: a data integration tool.
CAS Liaison Analytics: advanced analytics solution and data reporting tool.
Liaison Outcomes: a platform for review processes.
WebAdMIT: a platform for review processes.

How to Use This Guide

Each section below focuses on a specific federal change (e.g., Title IX regulations, OMB SPD 15 revisions, or the 2023 Supreme Court decision). For each change, you will find:

A brief description and effective dates.
Links to primary federal or legal sources.
A table summarizing required or recommended updates for each Liaison product.

Use these tables with your institutional legal counsel and IT teams to plan updates to configurations, integrations, and user access for Liaison products like the CAS Applicant Portal, CAS API, Liaison Analytics, Liaison Outcomes, and WebAdMIT.

Future Updates Related to Additional Federal Changes

Liaison will continue to monitor additional federal regulations and guidance related to applicant characteristics that affect application and reporting practices. When new changes are announced, this article will be updated with sections providing guidance for each Liaison product. If you have questions about how a specific regulatory change applies to your CAS or integration, contact a member of your account team and consult with your institutional legal counsel.

2024 Marital Status in Title IX of the Education Amendments

Effective August 2024, the Code of Federal Regulations, specifically Title 34, Part 106, deals with non-discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities receiving federal financial assistance. Within that code, section 34 CFR § 106.21(c)(4) is part of the broader implementation of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in any school or other education program that receives funding from the federal government. It states that:

The University is barred from "[m]ak[ing] a pre-admission inquiry as to the marital status of an applicant for admission, including whether such applicant is 'Miss or Mrs.' A [university] may ask an applicant to self-identify their sex, but only if this question is asked of all applicants and if the response is not used as a basis for discrimination."

Liaison interprets this to require removing all salutations from the CAS applications to comply with this regulation. Although the regulation is effective as of March 2024, enforcement is not expected until fall 2024. To comply with this regulation, our team has completed the development process to effect this change. See the 2024 Release 7 release notes for more information.


Liaison Product	Guidance
CAS Applicant Portal	Applicants will no longer be able to view the Title field on the Create Your Account, My Profile, or Reapplicant pages, or the full application PDF. While Liaison has removed this field, any applicants who completed it prior to removal will retain that data.
CAS API	The Title field will remain in the CAS API. Existing applicant data will remain, but no new applicant data will be available. You should review data integrations that include this field and update them appropriately.
Liaison Outcomes	The Title field will remain in Liaison Outcomes. Existing applicant data will remain, but no new applicant data will be available. You should review any data integrations and email templates that include this field and update them appropriately.
WebAdMIT	Now that Title information is no longer being collected from applicants, starting in your CAS's 2023-2024 or 2024-2025 cycle, any data in the Title field (labeled as Salutation within WebAdMIT) will be removed from WebAdMIT. Then, starting in your CAS's next cycle, the Title field (i.e., Salutation field) will be removed from WebAdMIT. You will need to update any lists, exports, email templates, and other integrations to account for this field removal.

2023 SCOTUS Affirmative Action Decision Around Race and Ethnicity

In June 2023, the US Supreme Court struck down the ability of public and private universities to include affirmative action in admissions decisions.

Each college and university should consult its institutional policies and procedures for guidelines, such as:

Whether to require or recommend that race and ethnicity be hidden from reviewers.
Whether to include information about an applicant's race/ethnicity and/or underrepresented status within a scoring rubric.
Whether to provide access to applicant information to any member of your campus community (including those who are not involved in the admissions review or decision-making process).

Having a campus policy that prohibits admissions officers from using race in admissions decisions is encouraged.


Liaison Product	Guidance
CAS Applicant Portal	CASs can continue to collect race and ethnicity data. Historically, race and ethnicity questions have been optional on most CAS applications. If the race and ethnicity question is removed from the CAS application, each college and university would determine the method by which they would collect this information locally based on institutional policies and procedures. For CASs associated with a professional association (e.g., the Physician Assistant Education Association), the association consults its advisory boards to determine which data fields appear on the CAS application. For CASs that operate independently of an association (e.g., California State University), the school or school system determines the data fields that appear on the CAS application.
CAS API	You cannot hide race or ethnicity data from the data file, as the CAS API is intended to provide all of the CAS data to the institution so it can be manipulated once it is on the school’s server. You can access a "Reviewer" PDF type that omits race and ethnicity data from the full application PDF. To do so: If downloading on demand: use reviewer for the pdfType query parameter in the GET Application PDF API endpoint. If using a subscription: use reviewer for pdfType in the responseOptions parameter in the POST Subscription APIs. If you have an existing subscription, delete the subscription before creating a new subscription for the full application PDF, omitting race/ethnicity. To do so: Determine which subscription has the Full Application PDF business event. The subscription may include additional business events. Delete the subscription with the full application PDF business event. Recreate the subscription with the new responseOptions parameter for the Full Application PDF business event. "responseOptions": "contentType=application/pdf,pdfType=reviewer"
Liaison Outcomes	Coming soon!
WebAdMIT	Work Groups Use Work Groups to remove race and ethnicity data from the Applicant Details page and full application PDF during the application review process. So, when someone from your team is looking at a student’s application, it is eliminated as a factor in their admissions decision process. See the Work Groups Guide for example templates. Lists, Exports, and Reports If you have a user who also needs the data management functions like List Manager, Export Manager, and Report Manager, they’ll have access to race and ethnicity data. They still will not be able to review based on race unless they build a list or export using this information, examine the results, and then return to one of the applicants to review them with that knowledge. If you don’t want your users to have any access to race and ethnicity information, you’ll have to remove the following from their Work Group: The Manage Lists, Reports, and Exports permission. The applicable subpanels (race and ethnicity data may appear under the Personal Information or the CAS Custom Questions panel). Additionally, if you have access to lists, exports, reports, etc., you can run and duplicate lists and exports. If you’re an administrator and you’re concerned about a particular list, export, etc. that another admissions member or faculty has created, you can double-check it by running it to see the data and/or duplicating it to see how it was built, and handle the situation accordingly. Full Application PDFs Use Work Groups to remove race and ethnicity data from the full application PDF during the application review process. If a user builds a Work Group that suppresses race and ethnicity data and puts themselves into that Work Group, they could then download an application PDF without race and ethnicity information. Additionally, they could use the PDF Manager to bulk download the application PDFs and create a custom template of the sections and panels they want to include.