stephanieandersonquinn-lab/title-ii-ipeds-crosswalk: Title II–IPEDS Crosswalk & Longitudinal Teacher Preparation Dataset

Release v1.0 — Title II–IPEDS Crosswalk & Longitudinal Teacher Preparation Dataset March 25, 2026: Visit the GitHub Repository for the most recent version of repository notebooks, files, and directions. This release provides the first public version of an open-source methodology and reproducible codebase for constructing a longitudinal crosswalk between two federal education datasets: the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and Title II (Sections 205–208) of the Higher Education Act (HEA). Because IPEDS and Title II do not share a common institutional identifier, they cannot be merged directly. This repository addresses that limitation by harmonizing Title II data across reporting years (2012–2024), standardizing institution and program names, and applying deterministic and fuzzy text-matching techniques followed by manual validation. The resulting crosswalk enables program-level, place-based analysis of teacher preparation pathways that is not possible using either dataset alone. Contents of this release include: • Code to harmonize Title II data from 2012–2024 to the 2024 reporting schema • A validated crosswalk linking Title II programs to IPEDS institutions (UnitID) • Reproducible Google Colab and Jupyter notebooks for data processing and merging • Audit outputs identifying expected non-matches and remaining unmatched records • Documentation describing data sources, methods, and schema alignment decisions Key methodological features: • Explicit handling of reporting changes introduced in Title II beginning in 2019–20 • Standardized name normalization across datasets to address inconsistent institutional naming • Fuzzy matching with an 80% similarity threshold and manual review of ambiguous cases • Classification of programs expected not to map to IPEDS (e.g., alternative, non-IHE-based programs) Raw federal source files are not redistributed in this repository. All notebooks are designed to pull data directly from official public URLs where available or from user-provided local files. This release is intended to support education researchers, policymakers, and practitioners seeking to analyze teacher preparation pipelines with greater geographic and programmatic specificity. The code and documentation are released under the MIT License and may be reused, adapted, and extended with attribution. Future releases may incorporate additional validation, expanded documentation, and updates aligned with changes to federal reporting. Full Changelog: https://github.com/stephanieandersonquinn-lab/title-ii-ipeds-crosswalk/commits/v1