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Introduction

Source: vignettes/introduction.Rmd
introduction.Rmd

Data on US higher education institutions

For those interested in data on higher education institutions in the United States, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) is an invaluable resource. What is IPEDS? From the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) web site:

[IPEDS] is a system of interrelated surveys conducted annually by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). IPEDS gathers information from every college, university, and technical and vocational institution that participates in the federal student financial aid programs. The Higher Education Act of 1965, as amended, requires that institutions that participate in federal student aid programs report data on enrollments, program completions, graduation rates, faculty and staff, finances, institutional prices, and student financial aid.

IPEDS covers most (though not all) higher education institutions:

The completion of all IPEDS surveys is mandatory for institutions that participate in or are applicants for participation in any federal student financial aid program (such as Pell grants and federal student loans) authorized by Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965, as amended (20 USC 1094, Section 487(a)(17) and 34 CFR 668.14(b)(19)).

Institutions that complete IPEDS surveys each year include research universities, state colleges and universities, private religious and liberal arts colleges, for-profit institutions, community and technical colleges, non-degree-granting institutions such as beauty colleges, and others.

Using IPEDS

There are a number of ways to use IPEDS data. For information on single institutions, one can use the College Navigator. NCES also provides a [Data Explorer}(https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/search) with a number pre-compiled tables that some may find sufficient.

For researchers interested in performing analyses across many institutions, however, the complete data files are the most useful. These complete data files are shared via Microsoft Access databases or separate CSV files. Whereas Access databases go back to the 2004-2005 school year, the CSV versions of the data files contain some information as far back as 1980.

IPEDS is complex and does not have an API

The IPEDS database is complex. Downloading separate CSV files requires users to both understand where to find variables of interest and how to append / join these files into a single data frame that can be analyzed.

Unlike some other federal data sources on higher education (like the College Scorecard), IPEDS does not have an API that allows users to directly pull data for analyses or applications.

Purpose of ripeds

The purpose of this package is threefold:

  1. To provide an API-like interface between IPEDS and R
  2. To facilitate finding and pulling relevant variables without requiring detailed knowledge IPEDS’s structure via an interactive dictionary function
  3. To make it easy to batch download large parts of IPEDS (including full dictionary files) for users who need to save the original files on their machine and would like an easier and automated way of doing so

Other R package options

Besides ripeds, there are other tools to access IPEDS data via R that users may find helpful:

  • ipeds, which uses the Microsoft Access files.
  • educationdata, which accesses Urban Institute’s Education Data Portal internal API. Data sources other than IPEDS may be accessed via Urban Institute’s API.