IPEDS poised for ‘huge’ expansion

Inside Higher Ed reports that the U.S. Education Department is “quietly moving ahead with plans to significantly expand the information and data it collects from colleges each year” through IPEDS, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. The plan appears to be driven by recommendations from Education Secretary Margaret Spellings’ Commission on the Future of Higher Education report unveiled last fall.

Operation “Huge IPEDS” would broaden IPEDS data collection to include two new categories: “what the department calls ‘a new accountability part’ and an expanded section of information about financial aid, which seems to be designed to help the department come up with a method of reporting on the ‘net price’ that different categories of students might really pay (as opposed to the ‘sticker price’ that gets widely reported) to attend a particular college.”

Inside Higher Ed breaks it down:

Under the “new accountability part,” colleges would be asked a set of four questions. Some are straightforward; the department asks if institutions have online “fact books” and if they post information on their Web sites about assessment or student learning outcomes, and requests links to those pages, which the department says it would add to the Web-based College Opportunities Online Locator. …

But the department also asks whether colleges use specific student learning assessments, such as the National Survey of Student Engagement, Community College Survey of Student Engagement, Collegiate Learning Assessment, and National Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress, and to specify which other assessment tools they use. Colleges would also be asked to say if the institution makes its results on these measures available online on its own Web site, and to provide the appropriate Web address, which would also be added to the COOL Web site.

The department’s plan would also ask (and by 2008-9 require) colleges to provide, in matrix form, data on all accountability measures they use and “the institution’s score” on those measures. (The document does not make clear whether this information would be shared with the public, but if it would, colleges that now use these surveys and tests for internal purposes only would presumably be forced to reveal them.) The department’s request that a college report a single score for the institution is likely to renew concerns higher education leaders have expressed that the Spellings Commission’s push for accountability is overly simplistic, since most accountability measures that institutions use can’t be summed up in one “score.”

All of this must be approved by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget before it could take effect.