A service of the Higher Education Data Policy Committee (HEDPC), IR in the Know keeps you up to date on current and emerging issues related to higher education data collection, analyses, and reporting with a brief summary of topics and links to more detailed information. We welcome your feedback and suggestions. If you discover a resource or article that might be useful to other IR professionals, please send an email to irintheknow@airweb.org.

• CIP 2010 Wizard - The Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP), developed by the National Center for Education Statistics, provides a taxonomy to support the tracking, assessment, and reporting of fields of study and program completions in postsecondary education. NCES initially developed CIP in 1980 and CIP 2010 is the fourth revision of the taxonomy. Institutions will be required to use CIP 2010 beginning with the 2010-11 IPEDS data collection. The surveys affected are the Completions Survey (Fall 2010), the Institutional Characteristics Survey (Fall 2010), and the Fall Enrollment Survey (Spring 2011).
  
  To help institutions determine the impact of the move to CIP 2010, NCES has developed the CIP Wizard . By using the CIP Wizard, institutions can run a report which maps their programs from CIP 2000 to CIP 2010 based on the last three years of completions data. The report provides institutions with a list of codes which have changed or been deleted as well as new codes institutions can review to determine if they better describe the programs offered. The Wizard also allows institutions to create a custom report by uploading, pasting, or selecting codes one by one.
  
  
• PowerStats, a data analysis tool, provides access to nine NCES postsecondary datasets including the two most recent National Postsecondary Student Aid Studies (NPSAS), the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study (BPS), the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study (B&B), and the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF).
  
  Users can create tables and run linear and logistic regressions with a drag and drop interface, receiving their results in a range of formats, including Excel and PDF. As the replacement to the NCES Data Analysis System (DAS), PowerStats provides helpful new features including improved capacity to search for variables and saving recoded variables for future use. In addition, PowerStats allows users to build an online library of their work and to share their work with other PowerStats users.

Student Poll
The College Board and the Art and Science Group collaborate to present results from national surveys which measure the opinions, perceptions, and behavior of college-bound high school students and their parents through a publication titled Student Poll. The current issueaddresses college affordability in “Students and Parents Making Judgments about College Costs without Complete Information” (Volume 8, Issue 1). The findings suggest parents and students make decisions about college costs without accurate or complete information about what their likely financial commitment for college will be. The report states “the majority of students and parents are ruling out colleges based solely on a school’s published sticker price without taking into account what they might receive in financial aid.” They also report students may be overestimating their financial aid, engaging in “a bit of wishful thinking.”

Past issues of Student Poll have addressed topics such as social networking, college rankings, and the impact of the economy. The Student Poll articles are provided free on both the College Board and Art & Science Group web sites.

Common Data Standards
The Common Data Standards (CDS) initiative is a national, collaborative effort to develop voluntary, common data standards for a key subset of K-12 and K12 to postsecondary education transition variables. The objective is to help state and local education agencies and higher education organizations work together to identify a minimal set of key data elements and to agree upon standard definitions, business rules, and technical specifications for those elements. This will improve the comparability and portability of the data. General information on this national initiative can be found at commondatastandards.org. The first draft of the proposed data elements is available on the web site. While the initial comment period for the first draft has passed, the Technical Working Group convened by the U.S. Department of Education will continue to accept comments throughout the summer.

State Longitudinal Data Systems Grant
The Institute of Education Sciences recently awarded grants to 20 state education departments for the design and implementation of statewide longitudinal data systems. These grants, funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009, are intended to support states with the development and implementation of systems that support the linking of data across time and databases from early childhood through K-12 and postsecondary education, into career. States receiving grants include Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.