Seattle — Colleges must steel themselves for a new era of intensive federal oversight, an accreditation advocate said on Sunday evening during a plenary address at the annual meeting of the Association for Institutional Research.

The speaker, Judith S. Eaton, who is president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, predicted that the Higher Education Act — the final terms of which are still being negotiated — will require colleges to report to the federal government on at least 300 new topics, including tuition increases, transfer-of-credit policies, file sharing, meningitis outbreaks, fire safety, voter registration, and technology disposal. Ms. Eaton had an attentive audience: The institutional researchers gathered here will often be responsible for crunching the numbers and shipping their colleges’ reports to Washington.

Ms. Eaton expressed regret that the traditional relationships among colleges, accreditors, and federal regulators were being transformed. (One of her slides showed a representation of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, with the caption “The Government Drives Accountability.”) But she said that she understood the public anxieties that have given rise to the new federal role. “We ought to be accountable when we’re spending a hundred billion dollars or so in federal money,” she said. “We do have obligations here.”

Ms. Eaton urged college leaders to take their own steps to improve their institutions’ responsiveness and accountability. If she were a college president, she said, she would make clear to the world what her institution was trying to achieve and how it would measure its success. “I would do transparency audits,” she said. “I would have a Web site, for example, that tells anybody who goes there immediately some very salient things about the performance of my institution vis-à-vis its students. With all due respect to all of the wonderful college Web sites out there, that kind of information isn’t easy to find on many of them.” —David Glenn