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 important higher education data sources and explain how to properly merge them in order to conduct analyses. I conclude by providing some examples of how researchers merged multiple datasets in order to conduct policy analyses.