Does anyone know what is happening with College Navigator (the feds’ website that aggregates lots of IPEDS data and is designed to be helpful to families as they look for higher education)?
Over the last week the homepage has either been down, or I can access the homepage but then searching functionality is not working. Are they trying to update all the info and this is just a down period? Or is this a website that the government is removing as it will no longer be updating? Or…?
Oh no! No inside info, but man, I hope they get that resolved. I think College Navigator is one of the best resources available for exploring possible schools.
The Federal government has gutted NCES, so they are having a difficult time doing anything. This is likely one more of the many issues that they will be having.
From a fedscoop, last spring…here’s an excerpt, full text at link below:
A former IES official, meanwhile, told FedScoop that they know of at least one of the agency’s major tools that hasn’t been updated because of data collection challenges: College Navigator.
College Navigator is housed under the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) within IES. The former IES official said it was “typically considered to be the most trustworthy data for students who were looking at applying to colleges.”
Updates to the navigation tool, which is required by the Higher Education Act, remain in limbo. A staff member volunteered to continue working to get the tool updated one more time before he was terminated from the agency, the official said. “And [they] were not allowed to do that.”
Historically, the admissions data would update around the first week of June. Last year the update occurred months later. Is it at all possible they are merely in the proceas of rolling over to the 25-26 CDS data (24-25 admissions)?
By statute, the information is required to come from the IPEDS report. CDS is not a government report, and it is voluntary. It is intentional that the information is not being updated. That’s all I’ll say about that.
IPEDS surveys went out, and also include the new ACTS component (7 (!!!) years of historical data across a range of questions.)
Outside vendors have always been heavily involved with IPEDS data collection and analysis. I assume that’s still the case (RTI is one of the big vendors, that hosts the ACTS FAQs linked above.) With that said, ED and NCES departments have been decimated as we all know. I’m not quite sure if college navigator is ‘required’ to be maintained/updated as part of IPEDs.
Note: College Navigator’s search function is working for me today.
From the Department of Education:
Under the Higher Education Act of 1965 (HEA) and the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) , the U.S. Department of Education is legally mandated to maintain this public, consumer-facing website. The tool is operated by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to provide transparent institutional data for all postsecondary schools participating in Title IV federal student aid programs
The web of computer systems within the Department of Education has traditionally made updates challenging. The dramatic cutbacks within the Department exacerbate the challenges. While College Navigator is required to be updated by the HEA and the HEOA, the enforcement mechanism is internal.
Thanks for sharing. Hopefully college navigator’s issues with access and the search function have been related to updating data. It does look updated for 2024/25, at least for some schools that I’ve looked at.
I used to coordinate IPEDS reporting for my school, and I was responsible for a lot of the data. Schools take it very seriously, spending many hours gathering required data. The information is helpful for students. I hope that the data will continue to be collected, updated and shared going forward.
I wonder if there is public or private entity that has last year’s data? Like a library or archive?
But that doesn’t help if all the DOE employees or contractors are no longer working.
Could someone su eto have DOE collect and maintain data ? Who would have standing?
Does it let you filter by either average net cost or net cost based on your finances?
The website looks like it’s been designed/coded by a total amateur. Just sayin’
Believe it or not, some of the department’s programming is done in COBOL. When I used to go to Federal Student Aid conference, the description of their systems & the challenges they presented made me wonder how they kept it all going.
College Navigator is not pretty or fancy, but is functional for getting many items of information about a college (e.g. financial aid demographics, distribution of majors, etc.). Web site fanciness often just makes loading the web site annoyingly slower.
The website looks okay to me, and worked as expected with some basic searches earlier in the week. Is it still not working for you? If so, what specific page or functionality?
It seems to be working now, but it was non-responsive at around the time this thread was started.
As @ucbalumnus indicated, it wasn’t working properly at the time I started this thread and had a similar issue earlier in the week. I am away from a computer for a few days, but I’m glad things are working again.
It seems to be working. No idea if reheat messed with the data.