This Week In IPEDS (TWII)

As you may be aware, the U.S. Department of Education provided guidance for the implementation of Year-Round Pell Grants beginning in 2017-18, allowing eligible students to receive up to 150 percent of a student's Federal Pell Grant Scheduled Award for an award year (https://ifap.ed.gov/dpcletters/GEN1706.html). For purposes of reporting data in the IPEDS Student Financial Aid (SFA) survey component, data providers should be advised that the entirety of the Pell grant awarded, including amounts above 100% of the maximum award, are to be reported in SFA, where applicable and for the financial aid award year applicable. Users of IPEDS data should note that the increase in Pell Grant aid due to Year-Round Pell could impact the calculation of net price beginning in 2017-18, as the average total cost of attendance for first-time, full-time undergraduates becomes less well aligned with the average grant/scholarship aid awarded to those students.

Approaching the last weeks of the IPEDS Winter data collection, please be advised that this is the busiest period of the entire collection year for the IPEDS Help Desk. In order to assure that the Help Desk is able to provide the most efficient assistance, please consider the following recommendations:

• Between now and the Winter Keyholder deadline (February 13, 2019), please focus any inquiries on the Winter survey components. Once the Winter deadline passes, the Help Desk will have more time available to assist with the Spring survey components (for which the Keyholder deadline is April 10, 2019).
• As the February 13th Keyholder deadline approaches, it is likely that calls will increasingly be queued. Contacting the Help Desk as soon as possible will result in less time waiting to have your call answered.
• Because edit errors in one section of a survey component are often related to similar edit errors in other sections, please make every effort to complete a survey component in its entirety before contacting the Help Desk, so that all edit errors can be discussed on a single call or in a single email.

The National Postsecondary Education Cooperative (NPEC) commissioned three research papers to investigate and advance potential suggestions on improving the IPEDS Data Collection:

1. Collecting data on transfer students, entitled "Assessing the Capacity of IPEDS to Collect Transfer Student Data"
2. Improving the student financial aid survey, entitled "Making the IPEDS Student Financial Aid Survey Data Meaningful"
3. Collecting data on graduate students, entitled "Suggestions for Improving the IPEDS Collection of Graduate Students Data"

These papers and previously commissioned papers can be found on the NPEC products website: https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/npec/national-postsecondary-cooperative-education-npec-products. Created in 1995, NPEC is a voluntary organization that represents a variety sectors and stakeholders of the postsecondary community. For more information on NPEC, visit the NPEC page (https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/join-in/npec) located within the IPEDS website.