rwebdb – Questions About IPEDS

An ongoing log of questions about the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) as I use it to build a data warehouse around pricing and costs in higher education in the United States.

1. Why are there no data files for 1999? [10-May-2010]

From Samuel Barbett, IPEDS staff member, 03-June-2010

The 1999 IPEDS was the last survey done by paper. In 2000 we began our web data collection. To get the web-based data collection started a decision was made to allocate resources from the 1999 collection to the 2000 web-based collection. This meant that we did collect the 1999 data, did some initial followup and editing and released the 1999 as additional early release data. We did not impute for nonresponse and therefore did not do national summaries of the data which are prerequisite for a public use release.

The good news is that we did undertake the imputation task about a few years ago and in our spare time (current year processing always takes precedence) have a report ready for publication. So the 1999 data should be available hopefully before summer ends.

2. Why are there 1264 institutions with unitid 247719 in the 1986 directory data file? [11-May-2010]

3. What variable filters did NCES use to identify institutions of higher education for Table 265 in the Digest of Education Statistics 2009 for the survey years 1980, 1984, and 1985? I’ve not been able to duplicate these counts with the IPEDS public release data files. [14-October-2010]

4. Why do fall enrollments from the IPEDS public release data files for 1987, 1988, 1989 and 1998 differ from enrollments that appear in Table 190 of the Digest of Education Statistics 2009? [14-October-2010]

5. Why do graduate weighted tuition and fees for survey years 1987 and 1988 differ from those in Table 337 of the Digest of Education Statistics 2009? [16-November-2009]