“Service to many leads to greatness.”
      – Chinese fortune cookie

The Commission collects a wide variety of data about higher education in California. New data and sources of data are always being added. Use these pages as a Guide to information about the data we maintain.

A frequently asked question is "how do we get our data"? We receive aggregated data (pre-combined counts from a variety of columns such as school code, gender and ethnicity) from the California Department of Education (CDE), the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), and other sources. CDE provides data on K-12 students and high school graduates. IPEDS supplies enrollment and completions data for private higher education institutions.
We obtain unitary (individual records) enrollment and completions data from the public higher education systems (UC, CSU, Community Colleges). These data are then aggregated to create useful data for you, our consumers.

• Where To Find Data: Links to the various ways to get data on the Commissions website.
• Sign Up for Notification: Sign up for e-mail notifications about changes to various parts of the website.
• Data Sources and Timing: The source of each type of data collected, when it is collected, when it is processed and available, and where it is used on the website.
• Dates of Available Data: Years available for each of the Custom Data Reports.
• Data Element Dictionary: Definitions of the codes used in the Commission's data.
• Data Partnerships: Partnership with Federal and State agencies, the Public Segments, and Private Organizations providing data variety.
• Data Caveats: Inconsistencies of data.
• Index: Can't find what you are looking for? Try the Index. There are over 2,500 terms listed with over 25,000 links to over 3,800 web pages.