Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System

Recently, I found a great data source for information from Institute of Education Sciences. It's the United States integrated postsecondary education system (IPEDS).

You can get a ton of data from the site such as:

• Look up data on one institution
• Compare institutions
• Sort institutions on one variable
• View trends for one variable
• Use pre-packaged reports
• Download custom survey files
• Download custom data files

I compared the graduation rate of a few schools that are near and dear to my heart and I was surprised a bit at the difference in graduation rates.

Here's the total graduation rate:

And then the graduation rates of those students that complete in 4 years:

Seeing that all of these universities are quality institutions I was surprised by the variance in graduation rate both overall and at the 4 year level.

This is just a bit of what you can do with the data. Check out more at: http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/.