One School, One ID � The Quick and the Ed

One School, One ID � The Quick and the Ed

One School, One ID

by Ben Miller

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s default rate package this week has a chart showing 20 for-profit colleges that would be at risk for losing federal aid eligibility if a new calculation were in place today. It’s a fine chart, but it also encapsulates a huge weakness in the way cohort default rates are calculated.
The U.S. Department of Education uses two main ways to identify colleges and universities–a six digit identification number that is used for the IPEDS data system and an eight digit number used by the Office of Postsecondary Education known as an OPEID. Each number is used to obtain different kinds of data. IPEDS includes information on enrollment, graduation rates, finances, and most everything else that shows up oncollege navigator. The OPEID meanwhile, is used for all the borrowing data and default rates on the Federal Student Aid Data Center.
Unfortunately, the OPEID and IPEDS numbers are different, so any attempt to analyze borrowing data and other school information requires matching the two figures. That’s doable, but here’s where the fun begins—a single