Do Not Discard $16 Billion: Accounting for IPEDS Administrative Unit Observations
Around $16 billion in revenues and expenditures are reported within administrative unit observations in IPEDS finance data each year. Commonly used procedures for preparing IPEDS finance data lead researchers to incorporate none or only a portion of these dollars. When incorporated, the dollars are sometimes only assigned to some of the system members (i.e., the higher education institutions associated with the administrative unit). This research note provides clear guidance for how researchers can fully incorporate these dollars and connect them to all system members. Before doing so, it analyzes IPEDS data to reveal five novel findings regarding revenues and expenditures held within administrative unit observations. The guidance contains a simple decision rule that will prove useful for most studies: The allocation solution (i.e., allocating administrative unit dollars to individual institutions) should be used for systems housing four-year public institutions and the collapsing solution (i.e., combining information for all system members into one observation) should be used for systems solely housing private institutions or two-year public institutions. Further information is supplied for those who want to develop methods that are tailored to the particulars of their studies. To make the guidance feasible to implement, supplementary resources are provided. This research note ends with an illustration that demonstrates how research findings can meaningfully vary across alternative treatments of administrative unit observations.
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| Work Title | Do Not Discard $16 Billion: Accounting for IPEDS Administrative Unit Observations |
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| License | CC BY 4.0 (Attribution) |
| Work Type | Article |
| Publication Date | 2025 |
| DOI | doi:10.26207/qysv-4q02 |
| Deposited | February 24, 2025 |
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