In this episode, Armand Alacbay, Vice President of Trustee and Legislative Affairs at ACTA,  and Jerry Malitz, former Chief Information Technology Officer for the Department of Education’s Institute for Education Sciences, take a look at how federal education data can be used to understand your school’s performance relative to peers.   The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) houses powerful information on nearly every college in the country, providing data for public-facing websites and research tools like the College Navigator. New tools are now using IPEDS data to help parents and prospective students help make informed choices about where to attend college. Through this primer on institutional data, trustees can delve into metrics that are regularly collected by the federal government to inform strategic questions for the next board meeting.