The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) is the US Department of Education’s source for data on colleges and universities. The complete data files from the annual survey of institutions are available for download. This package simplifies downloading and reading groups of data files into R for analysis. A little. It is just a personal project, with no promises attached. Read the codebooks carefully.
To install the package, use
remotes::install_github("agoldst/ipedsr")The main functions are ipeds_download() and ipeds_load_series(). For a listing of IPEDS data files available the last time I updated the package, look at the included table, ipeds_surveys. There is a little documentation for each function; see help(package="ipedsr"). I’ll do more someday.
For example, for a tabulation of the totals of contingent and tenured/tenure-track faculty at all US higher-ed institutions (including for-profits, etc.)
library(ipedsr)
library(tidyverse)
# download and read in Employees by Assigned Position surveys
eap <- ipeds_load_series(str_c("EAP", 2018:2022), data_dir="ipeds")
eap |> group_by(year) |>
# faculty-status employees (tenure-track and non-)
filter(FACSTAT %in% c(20, 30, 40, 50),
# in instructional or instructional, research, and public service roles
OCCUPCAT %in% c(211, 215)) |>
# recode status categories
mutate(contingency=fct_collapse(as.character(FACSTAT),
TT=c(20, 30), # tenured or tenure-track
contingent=c(40, 50)) # non-TT or no tenure system
) |>
# tally up per-institution totals of TT and contingent fac.
group_by(year, UNITID, contingency) |>
# combine non-medical full- and part-time faculty in each category
summarize(faculty=sum(EAPFTTYP + EAPPTTYP, na.rm=T)) |>
# now tally totals for each year
group_by(year, contingency) |>
summarize(faculty=sum(faculty))