The Journalist’s Resource spotlights free databases journalists can use to report on higher education issues ranging from the changing demographics of U.S. college students to graduation rates, campus crime, faculty salaries and student health.
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No matter what issue you’re covering on the higher education beat, your story will be stronger if you ground it in high-quality data. Fortunately for journalists, government agencies and academic researchers have gathered data on an array of topics and made it available online for free. You just need to know where to find it.
That’s why we created this tip sheet. It spotlights 19 higher education databases we think you ought to know about. This list is not meant to be exhaustive. We included databases that will help journalists report on some of the most common and pressing higher education issues.
Note that most of these databases are the projects of federal agencies such as the U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and National Science Foundation. We’ll update this list periodically. Please bookmark it and share it with colleagues because it’s sure to come in handy.
This searchable database, created by the National Center for Education Statistics, provides basic information on nearly 7,000 U.S. colleges and universities. Use it to look up information about an institution’s admission rate, tuition, undergraduate enrollment, academic programs, athletic programs and other characteristics. You can also compare institutions.
The National Center for Education Statistics, commonly referred to as NCES, is part of the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education.
Journalists can use this online platform, another NCES project, to find detailed information on various topics across K-12 education and higher education. Sift through decades of data that the NCES has collected on college costs, student demographics, student debt, faculty demographics, faculty salaries, student graduation and dropout rates, and other subjects.
DataLab’s Tables Library contains more than 8,000 data tables published by the NCES. Journalists who are comfortable working with data can use the platform’s PowerStats tool to create data visualizations and run linear and logistic regressions.
You’ll find thousands of government data sets and data-heavy reports here — the federal government’s open data site. You can search for education data by location and government agency as well as by topic category and dataset format.
Use this higher education database, maintained by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Postsecondary Education, to find information on crime at U.S. colleges and universities that receive federal funding. You can look at three years of statistics for a single school or generate reports to examine trends across schools.
Crimes that institutions report annually to the federal government include murder, aggravated assault, rape, hate crimes, domestic violence, motor vehicle theft and violations of state or local liquor laws. Schools also must report arrests as well as any disciplinary action taken against students accused of certain crimes.
For student loan default rates, check out this higher education database, which is maintained by Federal Student Aid, an office of the U.S. Department of Education. You can search default rates by state, city, institution, institution type and degree program.
This is a national database of K-12 schools, colleges and universities that are being investigated by the federal Office for Civil Rights, a division of the U.S. Department of Education that investigates discrimination complaints. Here you can find information on investigations of alleged Title IX and Title VI violations. Title IX is a federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination at K-12 schools, colleges and universities that receive federal financial assistance. Title VI prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin.
This research database houses data collected as part of the Healthy Minds Study, an annual survey that asks college students about their mental health and their school environment, including campus safety, peer support and mental health services. More than 850,000 people at more than 600 colleges and universities have completed the survey since its launch in 2007.
The principal investigators of the Healthy Minds Study are researchers at the University of California-Los Angeles, University of Michigan, Wayne State University and Boston University.
Tufts University’s Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement — commonly known as CIRCLE — has created several online data tools journalists can use to obtain data for stories about young voters and civic engagement on college campuses. For example, its Youth Voting and Civic Engagement in America data tool allows journalists to examine the voting habits of young adults by state, county or congressional district.
If you’re looking into allegations of research fraud or misconduct, Retraction Watch can help. It maintains a database of retracted scientific papers that reporters can use to search for retractions connected to a specific researcher, university or research organization. There’s also a user guide. Retraction Watch’s parent organization is the nonprofit Center for Scientific Integrity.
Use this database, created by ProPublica, to look up tax returns and Form 990 filings for almost 2 million tax-exempt organizations, including non-profit colleges and universities. Form 990 filings contain information on an organization’s annual revenue, sources of revenue, expenses, and the names and salaries of its top executives.
The Community College Research Center’s website offers a variety of interactive platforms that allow journalists to explore data on U.S. community colleges and their students. For example, one focuses on community college finances during the pandemic. Another focuses on dual enrollment programs, which allow high school students to enroll at local colleges to earn college credits. The Community College Research Center is located at Columbia University.
This project provides data on minority-serving institutions, or MSIs. Some of these colleges and universities were founded specifically to serve racial minorities — for example, historically Black colleges and universities only served Black students for decades. Many MSIs are historically white institutions where enrollment has grown more racially and ethnically diverse over time.
The “Data & Reports” section of the Association of American Medical Colleges’ website offers a variety of reports and datasets on medical school funding, applicants, students, faculty and tuition. It also provides information on topics such as research lab productivity and medical students’ experiences with sexual harassment.
The American Bar Association provides reports and spreadsheets featuring data on U.S. law schools, law school enrollment and law students’ bar passage rates in the “Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar” of its website. It also provides reports on trends related to tuition, student and faculty demographics and student-faculty ratios.
Go to the College Board’s website for data and reports on the SAT college-entrance exam as well as the Advanced Placement program, which provides college-level curricula and exams for use at high schools worldwide. The College Board, a nonprofit organization that administers both, collects and makes public a variety of data on AP exam scores, SAT scores, students who take the AP exam, students who take the SAT and how both programs have grown over time.
Journalists can use this U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs database to compare the GI Bill benefits offered at individual trade schools, higher education institutions and employers across the U.S. The GI Bill helps U.S. military veterans and their family members pay for college or for personal expenses while training for a job.
Each year, the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics conducts a census of colleges and universities that spend at least $150,000 on research and development. The center, part of the National Science Foundation, publishes data tables and reports on the results of its Higher Education Research and Development Survey. Journalists can use them to find information on how much money institutions have spent doing research in different fields, their sources of research funding and how much schools spent on researcher salaries versus equipment, software and other expenses.
EdWorkingPapers is a searchable database of academic working papers on a variety of K-12 education and higher education topics. Anyone can read these papers for free thanks to this joint project of Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform and Stanford University’s Systems Change Advancing Learning and Equity initiative.
Commonly referred to as ERIC, the Education Resources Information Center is a searchable database of education research and information found in academic journals, books and government reports. While it’s free to use ERIC, which is sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education, journalists might need subscriptions to access many journal articles and book chapters.
This article first appeared on The Journalist’s Resource and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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