College Search, a tool and tutorial on using IPEDS college data

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IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) data is a vital data source for learning about colleges in the United States. As indicated in my previous articles, a good tool/program/application is very important in making a data usable.


In my previous article, I talked about how to use a program to monitoring the performance of peer institutions. In this article, I will go through the details of using the application to access IPEDS data and search for desired colleges/institutions. The process has many implications. For one, it can be used by high school graduates to search for college of interest. The same process can also be used by institution researchers in looking for potential peer institutions.

Information on the tool/program/application I used can be found at: IPEDS College Data UI and API project. The one interested for this article is: College Search - IPEDS data for High School Graduates + Researcher.


Before we begin, we need understand that when using any dataset, it is always important to have some basic knowledge about the industry/subject. For IPEDS, or, college/higher-education in the United States, these can include how institutions are classified and how these classification can change. For this article, what we need to understand is that institution can change - control, ownership included, and when searching them, it is important to look for them at a specific point in time, say, year. What you learn about an institution in one year, may or may not be hold for other years.

Back to the topic, the program we are going to look at has many uses. For this article, we will concentrate on just one tab/function - the institution tab. Under the institution tab, there are five sub-tabs that each provides well defined purposes to guide user to accomplish their goals.


The first sub-tab is the 'basic' sub-tab. The most important function for this tab is to establish the year of interest. User begin by searching the database for all years that are available and, then, select the year of interest. Once the year is selected, this tab also provide simple filter to limited the scope of search. Available options are detailed to assist user to make decisions.

After the basic categorical filter been applied, quantitative filtering can be applied by moving to the measures sub-tab. In this sub-tab, users can iteratively search and select the measures/quantities that are interested to them.

Once the measures of interest were selected, the Variable sub-tab is ready. In this tab,user get a chance to further qualify the measure/quantity they selected. For example, user maybe looking a the quantity of part-time enrolled male students while the qualifying 'factor' can be students levels, like undergraduate, or graduate students. By selecting applicable qualifying options and assign a name, a 'user-measure' is created ... like part-time-under-men, part-time-men-under-plus-graduate, ... etc.

With fully defined 'user-measures', user can now set the 'quantitative filters'. By moving to the Query sub-tab and typing in things like: part-time-under-men>1000 or
part-time-under-men/part-time-men-under-plus-graduate > 0.5, user can select institutions that met those criteria.

After the execution of the Query sub-tab, institutions found are appended to UnitId sub-tab. From there, you can retrieve the basic identity information of each selected institutions.

Once institutions were decided, user can use other major tabs to retrieve trend data about these institution and present these data in charts. For example: College Data Search - IPEDS tool for Peer Institutions Monitoring, the video and College Data Search, a tool - Monitoring Peer Institutions, the article.

As mentioned in the video, the process is very general. It can easily apply to any measures in the IPEDS database. The process also support the combination of measures and criteria. For example, user can even check if an institution's student minority ratio is higher than faculty's minority ratio.

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College Data Search, an IPEDS tool - Monitoring Peer Institutions

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IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) data, without doubt, can be considered as the most important data source for United States' postsecondary education. However, even though IPEDS made efforts to make the data accessible to general public, barriers for using and analyzing those data are still high.

As described in my previous articles(IPEDS College Data - Distance Education Enrollment Trend, Higher Education IPEDS College Data UI and RESTful API - defnition, charting, demonstration) and youtube videos(IPEDS College Data UI and API project), at this moment, I am personally developing a data system that will make accessing to IPEDS data easier.

My most recent video that demonstrated the recent improved to my app/program can be found at the Youtube.com: College Data Search - IPEDS tool for Peer Institutions Monitoring

The video demonstrated how to use the app/program to monitor the status of a list of institutions over time. In our particular case, we use the peer institutions list of the Indiana University at Bloomington. The list can be obtained directly from Indiana University's web site: http://uirr.iu.edu/index.html

As is demonstrated by the video, Indiana University at Bloomington has the highest number of undergraduate degree-seeking enrollment headcount comparing to all its peers. On the other hand, the percent of students that took on-line classes ranked Indiana University the third from the last among its peers (year 2016).

One institution also stand out from the video. As shown in the video, the University of Texas at Arlington started out as an plausible peer of the Indiana University at Bloomington even though it did have the highest number of online students. Over the years, however, it is obvious that the University of Texas at Arlington has taken an initiative that grown its online community way faster than the rest of the institutions, including Indiana University at Bloomington.

The video also try to make few points on the peer institution selection. As pointed out, the most important thing in selecting peer institutions is look at the restrictions or constrains. In the case of the out-of-state online enrollment, one possible restriction would be the mission of the institution. For example, if the Indiana University at Bloomington was limited by either the public opinion or the legislature to focus its resources on in-state students while the University of Texas at Arlington is not. The two institutions, then, should not be considered peers even if they have the similar resources to operate.

With the improvement done to the app/program, an upcoming video will demonstrate a way to select institutions based on profiles - a process that helps selecting possible peer institutions. That same process can also be used by high school graduates looking for similar institutions that meet their college expectations.

Please visit my video and feel free to comment on it. For one, any indication of interest in the program will drive me to put more time into the project.

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