“We are making this list available in an effort to bring more transparency to our enforcement work and to foster better public awareness of civil rights,” Catherine E. Lhamon, the assistant education secretary for civil rights, said in a written statement.

The Education Department announced on Monday that Tufts University in Boston had failed to comply with the federal law by allowing a sexually hostile environment to persist at the institution. The finding, which was the result of an investigation by the department’s Office of Civil Rights into a 2010 complaint by a student who said she was sexually assaulted, determined that Tufts had “failed to provide a prompt and equitable response” to complaints of sexual harassment and violence as required by the Title IX law.

The Obama administration, which has stepped up enforcement of civil rights laws, zeroed in on colleges and universities after a series of highly publicized assaults on campuses. The problem has also been a focus on Capitol Hill as lawmakers have taken on sexual assault in the military, where similar cultural issues and institutional truculence have bedeviled the process.

“Today’s move by the Department of Education is an important, helpful step for students and their parents, who until today had no way of knowing whether their school was under investigation for Title IX violations,” said Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, who plans to conduct a survey of 350 colleges and universities nationwide to monitor their handling of sexual assault cases. “We’ll continue working to help schools provide the highest level of responsiveness and protections for victims and to require the federal government to provide the highest level of transparency on compliance and enforcement.”

The White House task force found that nearly 20 percent of female college students have been assaulted, but that only 12 percent of cases are reported. It concluded that many women feared that their reports might become public, discouraging them from coming forward.