FAQ

Features

Troubleshooting

Data

Features

After you have generated results, click the red "save" button above the data tables. A pop-up window will appear with a permalink URL to your saved results, as well as an option to email your results.
The permalink URL not only stores your results, but also the parameters you entered into the site. This means that you can return to your query at any time, revise any of the parameters, and regenerate the results. For example, if you often analyze data for a particular group of colleges, you can use this feature to add or change variables in Explore All Data for that same list of schools.

In Explore All Data, click the red "advanced search" button under "Select College, State, or Sector" on the left side of the page. In the first drop-down menu (Level of Aggregation), select "State-Total" and click the red "show list" button. You will be presented with a list of the 50 states plus the District of Columbia. Click the blue link for "select all," then the red "add to list" button. All of the states will be added to the "You Selected" list on the left side of the page. Now you are ready to select variables and years.

After you have selected a college, state, or sector as a "focus" on our Spotlight page, the website refreshes with data for your selection and a default comparison. If you select an individual college, the default comparison will be aggregate figures for colleges in the same state and sector as your "focus." To compare your "focus" entity with another entity, click the grey "Change comparison" tab at the top of the page, to the right of the "Change focus" tab. A window will expand and allow you to select another college, state, or sector for comparison.

Please check that you have the latest version of Flash and Java installed on your computer. College InSight works best on Internet Explorer 7 or higher and Firefox 3. If you continue to experience problems, please contact us.

If the charts are not printing at all, make sure that you are using the red "print page" button on the screen; the file-print command may not correctly print the charts, which are dynamically generated using Flash.
If the page is not printing to scale, make sure you check the box "Shrink to Page Width" (Firefox) or "Enable Shrink-to-Fit" (Internet Explorer) in the Page Setup settings.
We do our best to ensure that the features of College InSight are compatible with updated versions of web browsers and operating systems, but new releases may create unforeseen issues. Please contact us with any bugs you see.

It is difficult to provide a concrete schedule because new data from different sources become available at different times. We plan to make periodic updates to College InSight to keep our data as timely as possible.

All institution-level data on College InSight originate from what schools themselves report to IPEDS or the Common Data Set survey, or from federal financial aid databases. Given the sheer quantity of institutions on the site and in order to maintain the integrity of the data from these outside sources, we generally do not make manual edits to individual data points. Nevertheless, we encourage you to contact us with any discrepancies you see so we can give you information about how to correct the data at the source.
For reference, see About the Data and Limitations for details on data sources and how we calculate particular derived variables. For information on other variables, check the codebook.

A "system" is a group of related campuses for which some data are only available for the group, not for individual campuses. Systems are necessary when schools report campus-level data to one data source but as a group of campuses to another data source. For example, some colleges report their FISAP and Pell data as a group but their IPEDS data as separate campuses. We discuss systems in more detail in the "Mismatched campus-level data" section on our Limitations page. Some groupings of colleges that people typically consider systems (e.g., the University of California) are not labeled in our database as "systems" because their campuses report all their data at the campus-level and not as a group. We will continue to examine the way we treat systems in College InSight to help minimize confusion without sacrificing data completeness and quality.