The accuracy of federal education data
by Jill Barshay
Correcting mistakes may be an essential part of a good education, but that doesn’t apply inside the branch of the U.S. government that compiles and keeps education statistics. Indeed, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) knowingly leaves in errors that are discovered two to three years later. And then this error-ridden data is used by education policy makers to make decisions.
I recently learned about these revision deadlines from the person in charge of the education data, NCES Commissioner Jack Buckley. Buckley explained that the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System data set, a.k.a. IPEDS, allows for one year of revisions (after the initial collection year) and then “locks” that year’s data forever. That’s been a frustration for for-profit universities who’ve been clamoring to retroactively revise their graduation rates upwards so that their students can remain eligible for federal student loans.
Another major data collection, the Common Core of Data, is kept active for only three years, effectively cutting off revisions afterwards.
The IPEDS data is self-reported and it may be wise to limit the ability of schools to game the data to their benefit. But the “locking down” of the data also means that more innocent mistakes are made that can never be fixed — and then used for analysis by the public. At a May 2, 2013 session of the
