An overview of the following process is described in “And what about graduation rates.” These basic steps can be used for researching a variety of college characteristics. Or you can save yourself some time with the DIY College Search Spreadsheet instead.
Goal: Create a target group of colleges that graduate that meet the following requirements
- 50% or better graduation rate
- Accepts at least 80% of its applicants
- has at least 400 fulltime undergraduate enrollment
Other considerations:
Private schools graduation rate will be based on four years and public schools will be based on five years.
The final data set which we’ll call the target group, must show the following for each institution:
- State located in
- Total fulltime undergraduate enrollment
- Graduation rates
- Web address
This demonstration uses the Firefox browser and MS Excel 2007.
![]() Select the IPEDS State Data Center. |
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![]() Next select the “Download Custom Data Files” option. |
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Select “Continue”![]() |
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We aren’t looking for a specific institution but want all that meet our requirements. So click on the select button by the institution fields without entering anything in the field. It will look like nothing is happening.![]() |
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Hover over the “By Variables” option to open the tab. Then select “Browse/Search Variables”![]() |
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When making your selections, you should see the following menu floating at the top of your browser window as you scroll down the page. We’re done selecting variables so it’s time to click on “Continue” from this form.![]() |
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The next screen will show you a summary of the variables you have selected. Let’s assumed that we haven’t made a mistake and click the “continue” button.![]() |
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Start by clicking on the “State abbreviation” link. We want to limit our target group to just colleges in the United States. Click on the “select all” option. Then scroll down to the end of the state listing and uncheck all the options that are not states. When you are done, click the blue “save” button. You should now see the number of values (51) selected appear next to the “State abbreviation” link.![]() |
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We want only four year institutions in our target group. For “Level of institution” select “Four or more years” and then save.![]() |
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We don’t want to include for profit colleges in our target group. Select “Public” and “Private not-for-profit” for “Control of institution” and click “save.”![]() |
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We’re looking for schools that admit 80% or more of their applicants. We could just us the greater than/equal sign and enter “80.” However, by using just the greater than and entering “79” we include schools that were really close to the 80 percent and should probably be considered. Select the mathematical sign, enter the number, and select “save.”![]() |
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We want to eliminate as many specialty schools as possible so we’re only going to include a college if it has 400 or more undergraduates enrolled fulltime. Select the greater than/equal to option and 400 click “save.”![]() |
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We want only schools with a graduation rate of 50% or higher. We’re using the 5 year rate at this point since the group we’re selecting includes both private and public schools. Once we have our data, we’ll eliminate any private schools with a four-year rate of less than 50%.![]() |
We’ve enter all of our search criteria so click the blue “Submit” button.
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This screen shows all the institutions that meet our requirements. This puts our target group at 107 colleges. Click the blue “Continue” button in the center to go to the next step.![]() |
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![]() select the next orange header section “Institutional Characteristics” and check “Institution’s internet website address.” |
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As you can see, there are plenty of other variables that we could select for our target group. But to keep things simple, let’s finish up and click on the blue “Continue” button.![]() |
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This screen shows us a summary of the variables we have chosen. The institution’s name is automatically included in the data. Since we’re happy with our current selections, click the blue “Continue” button.![]() |
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This provides a brief summary of our selected data and the down load option. Click on the download icon.![]() |
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Select the CSV option to download the data. You will be downloading a zip file that contains a data file and a definition file.![]() |
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The zip file contains two files. One will be an Excel file with the data and the other an HTML file with the data definition.![]() |
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When you double click on the html file, it should open in your default browser, in my case Firefox. You will see a list of variables with their definitions, formats, and descriptive statistics. You’ll use this as a reference for deciphering any column headings in the Excel file.![]() |
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Your spreadsheet should resemble the one above. You probably won’t need to refer to the data definition file since the column headers are actually pretty descriptive.![]() |
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Now that you have you’re table saved, it’s time to give your columns some meaningful names. Actually, it’s more of a problem of shortening the existing name and allowing the text to wrap. Go ahead and change column widths as necessary to format and make the data easier to read.![]() |
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Create a new tab and copy your formatted data to it. We have to eliminate all the colleges with a four-year graduation less than 50%. Remember, we had to use the five-year rate to select the data since it was the only to accommodate allowing us to use the five-year rate for public schools and the four-year rate for private schools. We’re going to take care of this on this new tab.![]() |
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Sort your data on Institutional Control (Private or Public) and then on the four-year graduation rate.![]() |
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Delete the rows for all private schools with less than a 50 % graduation rate.![]() |
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Create another tab to display your final data set![]() |
Delete any columns that you no longer need. I deleted the unitid, year, and graduation rates. |
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I find the list more usable if I can look up schools by state so I sort the data by state and then by name.![]() |
Ta-da! You have your final list of colleges! You can download the spreadsheet example of this process here. |
As stated in “And what about graduation rates?” this is a pretty limited list of colleges to work with. When you select your institutions, you probably don’t want to use graduation rates, or at least use a lower number to include more schools. You should always select the graduation rate as variable to display for the institution. Hopefully, this process shows you the wide variety of characteristics you can select for the institutions. If you want an already formatted Excel spreadsheet with the most useful available data, check out the DIY College Rankings Spreadsheet. |
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