National Center for Education Statistics

Unlike surveys that only ask a sample of colleges about their students, IPEDS requires every accredited college and university to report their numbers. This dataset counts how many degrees and certificates each school awarded each year, broken down by who earned them (race and sex). So you can see not just whether a school is graduating people, but whether those graduates look like the broader population or if certain groups are underrepresented. It's the most complete picture available of who's actually finishing college in America.

Want to know how many students actually graduate from a specific college within six years? This is the data behind those numbers. It breaks down graduation rates by school, by demographic group (race, ethnicity, gender), and by type of student cohort. If you're researching college completion rates, comparing schools, or analyzing whether graduation gaps exist between different groups of students, this is where that information comes from. NCES updates it every year for basically every accredited college in the country.

Every public school has neighborhoods around it, and this dataset tells you how many kids in those neighborhoods are living in poverty. The Census Bureau surveys households and measures family income; this data takes those Census estimates and matches them to school locations using GPS coordinates. So instead of just knowing a school's address, you know what the surrounding community looks like economically. Useful for comparing schools in wealthy vs. struggling areas, understanding which schools serve the poorest students, or studying whether neighborhood poverty affects student performance.

How many kids at each school come from families low-income enough to qualify for free or cheap lunches. That lunch eligibility number is basically a school-level measure of poverty. You can see which schools have lots of students in tough financial situations, which helps explain funding needs and educational challenges. The data includes direct certification too, which catches kids automatically eligible through other assistance programs.

In the 2022-23 academic year, colleges reported data on over $200 billion in student financial aid. This dataset shows, for every Title IV degree-granting institution in the country, how much money students got in grants (from the school, the federal government, states, or other sources), how much they borrowed in federal and other loans, and what students actually paid after aid was factored in, broken down by family income. You can see how these numbers have changed year by year from 2009 to 2023, and compare patterns across different colleges.

How are students in big city school districts doing in math and reading? This dataset has test scores from 28 major urban districts like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, going back to 2003. You can see how fourth and eighth graders are performing, and you can look at results separately for different groups of students: by race, by whether they're learning English, by family income, and by disability status. Each score comes with an error margin, so you can tell which differences between districts or groups are actually meaningful. It's a way to track whether test scores are going up or down over time, and whether achievement gaps between groups are closing or widening.