Education data sources for schools, districts and colleges
Candidate NCES and College Scorecard sources for schools, districts and universities, with identity, school-year and cohort requirements.
Match an institution before joining its data
A university branch, district and individual school require their own producer identifiers. Similar display names do not establish a match. Verify institution status, reporting year, parent relationships and coverage before combining records or interpreting a closure as a missing numeric value.
Catalog-only · documented candidate; observations not integrated
Match identities before comparing values
NCES CCD, IPEDS and College Scorecard use education-specific reporting entities. School IDs, district IDs and institution UnitIDs must be stored as identifiers with leading zeros preserved where applicable. Similar names do not justify merging institutions.
Branches, parent institutions, mergers, closures and changing coverage require verified entity histories. Fields of study use versioned classification codes, and mappings to occupations may be many-to-many. A field does not guarantee an occupation or salary.
Keep years and universes distinct
K–12 enrollment, attendance, teacher headcount, full-time equivalents and finance denominators describe different concepts. Current spending differs from capital spending. A pupil-teacher ratio is not class size. NAEP and state assessments do not share an interchangeable proficiency standard.
For higher education, retain academic year, entry cohort, measurement year and time since completion. Published tuition, attendance costs, net price and a student’s personal cost differ. Awards are not always unique graduates; restricted-cohort earnings do not describe all graduates.
Integration and access status
These products are documented candidates. Some NCES and Scorecard pages were accessible only through indexed documentation during research; production retrieval, schemas and usage conditions have not been validated. There are no locally maintained institution observations or outcome downloads in this release.
Before any institution profile is published, validate exact source files, identifier matches, cohort definitions, exclusions, update cadence and redistribution rights. The current education hub publishes ACS adult-resident attainment and enrollment, with no claim that these measure institution performance.