We have one primary source from which we derive our data: the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). Colleges nationwide submit their yearly data reports to IPEDS, making PEDS the standard place for information on all US-based colleges and universities. IPEDS posts the rights for this data as follows: “IPEDS is the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. It is a system of interrelated surveys conducted annually by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). IPEDS gathers information from every college, university, and technical and vocational institution that participates in the federal student financial aid programs.”
According to the IPEDS, people who come in to give data are usually college students (ages 18-23) who have provided information that they are comfortable sharing. This data is ethical and consent-based; the IPEDS privacy policy can be found HERE.
We also utilized data from Data USA, a reliable and credible information source that tracks US data. Data USA is where we collected data regarding the costs of Carleton College and the enrollment rates by Race and Ethnicity.Utilizing OpenRefine and the statistical programming language R, we cleaned all demographic and tuition data concerning Carleton College. In the cleaning process, we complied two main data sets: ‘race_carleton’ (this dataset contains the proportion of students by race and ethnicity enrolled into Carleton by the year, used to make the ‘Carleton Admissions by Race and Ethnicity’ graph), and ‘affording carleton’ (this data frame contains information on indirect and direct costs at Carleton by the year, used to make the ‘Affording Carleton’ graph).
