The week of May 25, over 1,000 institutional researchers and data professionals gathered in Washington at the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) Forum. It was a good reminder of something easy to forget when you’re deep in spreadsheets and data pipelines: the people who make higher education data reliable are mostly invisible to the students who depend on it.

The Humans Behind the Numbers

Students searching for colleges see clean profiles: graduation rates, admissions figures, financial aid information. What they don’t see is the institutional researcher who spent weeks reconciling a definitional change in how transfer students are counted, or navigating a mid-year Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) reporting update, or explaining to leadership why a number that looks good internally doesn’t match what showed up in a ranking.

That work is painstaking, and it matters. When it goes well, nobody notices. When it breaks down, students make decisions based on bad information — and that’s a problem Peterson’s has spent decades trying to prevent.

With one of the most comprehensive college databases in the country, Peterson’s Data sits at the end of a long chain of institutional effort. The admissions data, financial aid figures, and enrollment information students find on our platform only mean something if the reporting behind them is accurate. That’s not a passive dependency. It’s why we show up to the AIR Forum, why we hosted a session on the Common Data Set (CDS) methodology, and why we invest in direct relationships with institutional research offices rather than just scraping what’s publicly available.

The Federal Uncertainty Problem

A lot of hallway conversation at the AIR Forum this year orbited the same anxiety: what happens to institutional data infrastructure if federal reporting requirements keep shifting? IPEDS has been a stabilizing force for comparability across institutions. Uncertainty there creates downstream problems that take years to surface, but when they do, they appear in the resources students actually use.

This is part of where Peterson’s role becomes especially concrete. When federal data is delayed, revised, or inconsistent, students don’t stop needing information — they just have fewer reliable places to find it. Peterson’s direct data collection from institutions, built on relationships that go back to our founding, helps fill that gap. It’s not a perfect substitute for federal infrastructure, but it’s not nothing either.

Why the CDS Still Holds Up

The CDS was designed to be consistent — a shared framework so institutions wouldn’t have to answer the same questions seventeen different ways for seventeen different publishers.

That unglamorous function turns out to be pretty important. Peterson’s, the College Board, and U.S. News — we all draw heavily on CDS data. Which means a small error or ambiguity in how a single question gets answered can propagate across every platform a student might consult. Peterson’s has been part of the CDS initiative since its early days, and we take seriously our responsibility not just to use that data, but to flag problems, push for clearer definitions, and work with institutions when something doesn’t add up.

What It All Comes Back To

The annual AIR Forum serves as a recurring reminder that data work in higher education is student work. A student trying to figure out whether they can afford a school, or what their actual odds of admission might be, or whether a program has the outcomes they’re hoping for, is relying on information that someone had to carefully collect, verify, and report.

Peterson’s Data has served as the connective tissue between institutions and students for over 60 years. If you are an Institutional Research professional, please email the research team at Peterson’s Data if you need assistance submitting your CDS. We are here to help! 

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