In order to demonstrate the value of higher education and evaluate the effectiveness of various policies and practices, researchers are increasingly expected to merge data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) with a range of other federal and private-sector data sources. In this article, I detail a number of the most…

Provides guidelines for building a consistent and reliable database of expenditures within an institution of higher education. Stresses the importance of involving key constituencies, including both data providers and data users, in decisions about building the data elements for such a database and the resulting campus cost studies. (DB)

Data mining of IPEDS data is used to develop models that calculate predicted graduation rates for two- and four-year institutions. (Contains 7 tables and 5 figures.)