In this tutorial, the presenter walks through four fundamental skills for using the National Center for Education Statistics' IPEDS Compare Institutions tool. First, they demonstrate how to select a single institution (e.g., Fontbonne University) and proceed to the variable selection screen, where they choose frequently used variables such as 12‑month full‑time equivalent enrollment and 6‑year graduation rates across multiple years. Next, they show how to view the resulting data on screen and how to download it as a comma‑separated (CSV) file that opens in Excel. The video then provides practical Excel formatting tips—expanding columns, wrapping text, adjusting fonts—to make the data readable. As a bonus, the presenter shares a custom “Master List of IPEDS Numbers” Excel file containing unit IDs for over 1,300 private colleges, enabling users to paste multiple IDs into the tool and compare many institutions at once. Links to the Master List and other resources are provided in the description, and viewers are encouraged to subscribe and ask questions about IPEDS or private‑college financial statements.
Chapters
To get started on the 4 basic skills to compare institutions, using the National Center for Education Statistics and its IPEDS database. I've taken you to the homepage. We're going to select Compare Institutions. It's going to take us to the first data page and the first of the 4 skills. And the easiest way is to go ahead and just enter a college name. Let me type in one here in the St. Louis area, Fontbonne University. It brings it up after a couple of characters, so I'll select that. And then we're gonna go on and continue to Step 2, which is Select Variables right here. We're just gonna bring up two examples, and I'm gonna expand the Frequently Used Variables, derived variables, and I'm gonna go to 12-month enrollment right here, and I'm gonna select a series of dates, and it, it depends on whatever your uses are. I'm gonna select 5 or 6 years right here, and then we're just gonna select the 12-month full-time equivalent enrollment. You can select whatever combination of these items that you want. And then the other item, the other field that I want to select is Graduation Rates. And again, for some series of years, we're going to select the series of years that you want. And then I'm going to focus simply on 6-year graduation totals, the graduation rate with a bachelor's degree within 6 years total. You can see lots of other options. Feel free to choose those. You're limited to 256 total fields. So once we've selected the fields, and we've just selected 2 fields and 5 or 6 years, we're going to go back up and we're going to click on Continue right here. It'll confirm all the fields that we're using, and that's good for our purposes for this exercise. We'll click on Continue one more time. And the last thing we're going to look at is 2 ways to get the output. The 4th skill that I'm going to show you is this View On Screen. So we're going to click View On Screen, select on Continue, and the data will come up on your screen. And you can look at the years, you can scroll horizontally as appropriate to see what the data is. I'm going to change it this time to download in a comma-separated format. So this is essentially going to give us an Excel file. I'm going to click on Continue, and that will download a file that you can use. This is what the file will look like that is downloaded from IPEDS. And you can see it's kind of truncated. So just a couple of Excel tricks to help you get over the hump. So initially we're going to expand all these columns. So I'll just select all these columns. I will double-click on one of the right borders. And you can see we can now see all the field names. We can see the data. Let's go ahead and just kind of reselect those. And make them a little bit smaller so we can get all the data on one page. And then I'm going to select this row 1. I'm going to drag it down with a double-headed arrow here. And then while selected, I'm going to select Wrap Text that I have set up on the top. And now we're going to see all this data more easily readable. Let me just make the font a little bit smaller so now that we can see them all. And now all of a sudden we can see the university the data pieces all the way across. And now we can see our basic data from IPEDS and start to analyze it. I will show more substantial use of this data in another video. Let me show you one bonus trick. You remember our first time through we typed in one institution. I'm going to show you a tool that I've created that I'm gonna share with you in the description down below that will let you put in multiple colleges with a copy and paste function. So I'm gonna open up something called the Master List of IPEDS Numbers. I've taken the IPEDS data from more than 1,300 private colleges, and I have captured the unit IDs, or the IPEDS identifier, for all of these colleges by state. So for example, let's go and grab all of the colleges in Illinois. So you can see I've selected this field. It's got all of the unit IDs or the identification numbers for all the private colleges in Illinois. I'm going to copy that. I'm going to go back into IPEDS. I'm simply going to paste those unit ID numbers in there. And now you will see scores and scores of Illinois private colleges listed. Click on Select. All those colleges are listed. You can either select them individually that you'd like to compare. Or you can select all of them, and then you would simply continue on to the next step as I showed earlier in the video, which is on the variables, which you confirm each of the institutions under variables, and again, you can select enrollment or whatever that you want. A link to that Excel file with the unit ID is gonna be available in the descriptions below. Feel free to go ahead and use that for your purposes, and a link to the Excel file with all of those IPEDS unit IDs will be available in the descriptions down below. Feel free to use it for your research purposes. I will continue to provide you with new ways to use IPEDS and private college audited financial statements to help you better understand the financial strengths and weaknesses of not only your organization but its competitors as well. To keep those updates coming, make sure to click on the subscribe button down below. If you have questions about IPEDS or financial statements, leave them in the comments section and I'll be sure to respond promptly. And finally, all of the links I mentioned in this video are listed below in the description section. Make sure to check them out.
