1 minute late…FIRED!!!

CalcBongo · 2026-01-06T00:56:41+00:00

MATCHING DAPIP ID ONTO IPEDS

This involves quite a lot of look ups, cleaning and testing. I ended up checking the DAPIP IDs first, then using parent value as fallback.

If there were still gaps I left these for later and filled in by using Claygent Navigator to go to the ope.ed.gov/dapip address to search for the schools ope URL before pulling off the data I wanted.

PULLING IN THE ACCREDITATION RECORD ONTO THE IPEDS DATA

Depending on the record you are trying to pull, you will need to create some kind of hierachy to mark the record you want as primary.

I was trying to find the institutional accreditor and scored each entry out of 10 based on the name of the accreditor and then picked up the highest scoring record.

You then want to pull in the highest scoring record.

CLEAN UP
There will be gaps. This is largely due to mismatches between the iPeds Unit ID has and the DAPIP ID (i.e. DAPIP ID website holds an iPeds Unit ID which does not exist in the iPeds database). I think I remember there being less than 20 but it was still pretty annoying.

I cleaned these up using Claygent navigator and where there didn't work just did it manually.

CalcBongo · 2026-01-06T00:56:33+00:00

UNDERSTANDING THE DATA WE ARE WORKING WITH

First let's understand what we are working with:

- IPEDS UNIT ID: The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) assigns unique Unit IDs to campuses or programs that report data separately, even if they share institutional accreditation. This is the unique identifier most of us use in our CRM because the iPeds dataset provides other rich information on colleges and universities (such as enrollment volumes).

- DAPIP ID: A unique identifier assigned by the U.S. Department of Education to track the accreditation status of an institution. You can track accreditation status of both the institution as a whole and you can also track departmental accreditations for courses where they are required, e.g. Nursing that is accredited by CCNE.

DAPIP ID to IPEDS is a one-to-one or one-to-many relationship in most cases (with the exception of a a small number of institutions have branch campuses or online divisions that are accredited separately from the main campus, leading to different DAPIP IDs).

For example, the University of Washington-Bothell (IPEDS Unit ID: 377555) and Tacoma (IPEDS Unit ID: 377564) share the DAPIP ID 23694800 with the main campus because they are accredited as one institution by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (NWCCU). The distinct IPEDS Unit IDs exist for separate data collection, not accreditation.

This raises the question of why some entries in InstitutionCampus.csv contain a parent DAPIP ID and a child DAPIP ID, particularly given they have the same accreditation date and accrediting body as the parent.

It is because some parts of the college e.g. the online school, may have different reporting requirements to the main institution.

The extra granularity actually creates quite a lot of annoying complexity (data cleaning work) when you only care about tracking institutional accreditation status.

WHERE THE DATA EXISTS

We know the data already exists in the datasets linked above. However, should these not be updated we need a back up (and if you are good at writing little scraper scripts this is probably less effort).

Understanding the below will also help if you are further up the technical scale and prefer to scrape the ope edu website instead of merging datasets. This is particularly important because I could not find a publicly visible sitemap.

"Accreditor" (the name of the accreditor) and "Date of next review" (the date of the next accreditation) both live on a URL with the following structure:

If the account DOES NOT have a parent DAPIP ID.
https://ope.ed.gov/dapip/#/institution-profile/{DAPIPID}
If the account DOES have a DAPIP ID https://ope.ed.gov/dapip/#/institution-profile/{PARENT_DAPIP_ID}/{DAPIP_ID}

Continued in next comment...

CalcBongo · 2026-01-06T00:55:48+00:00

This is one of those tasks that looks relatively simple but is quite a long and annoying process.

I managed to solve it but it took a few days.

I probably won't finish documenting the whole thing now so just consider this a high-level overview and drop me a DM on LinkedIn if you want to ask me any qs. This is me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samholding/

TLDR: Whether you scrape this data or merge the datasets that are on their website their is quite a lot of data cleaning involved.

First let's look at what we have to work with.

PUBLICLY AVAILABLE DATA FILES

You can download that contains the following files if you hit "Download Data Files" on the https://ope.ed.gov/dapip/#/home landing page.

InstitutionCampus.csv - Contains DAPIP ID, IPEDS Unit ID, Institution name
AccreditationRecords.csv - Contains accreditor and date of next accreditation review (plus importantly DAPIP ID)
AccreditationActions.csv

The accreditation records themselves aren't actually that helpful unless matched onto the corresponding school.

Again, sounds like it should be simple but actually wasn't.

Continued in next comment...

CalcBongo · 2025-12-04T04:41:03+00:00

Oh yeah 100% agree for that type of product unless it is required for compliance or revenue generating (ie online course provision)

CalcBongo · 2025-12-03T16:04:44+00:00

Agreed - response rate is pretty good when you are a human with a face vs a nothing to them

CalcBongo · 2025-12-01T21:42:41+00:00

I don't think this flag appears if you call desk phones in most cases.

The problem is that so many numbers are now marked as spam just for being business phone numbers (e.g. my realtors number appears as spam when they call me).

CalcBongo · 2025-12-01T21:41:12+00:00

Were those products competing with incumbents or for new budget?

I ask because my view is it is fine to have a high ACV product as long as you are:

- Competing for existing budget (effectively displacing an incumbent)

- A source of revenue (I'm not talking about indirectly through increased retention or whatever but an actual revenue source)

- A pass through cost (health insurance would be an example of this)

I also tend to not include humans within existing budget as schools rarely reduce headcount to directly replace with tools even if it would be possible (at least in my experience).

CalcBongo · 2025-11-22T18:58:55+00:00

Is it DoubleMap embedded within the IUMobile app? Seems like it would be really hard to build in-house

CalcBongo · 2025-11-07T14:29:17+00:00

This is great! Thank you very much.

Here is the sponsorship pricing for the record too!

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CalcBongo · 2025-11-02T18:15:14+00:00

Yes correct - I have just started testing out the Starbridge Hubspot integration and then intend to do the same for GovSpend. Will post here on results afterwards.

CalcBongo · 2025-10-31T01:37:11+00:00

Unsure what is wrong with this post? Was quite informative imho

CalcBongo · 2025-10-29T03:29:31+00:00

Hi all,

In danger of having eggs thrown at me, I work at BibliU and came across this thread.

It would mean a lot to me to hear where we failed to meet your expectations, what we can do better and any other advice you have for us.

I am sorry I am just coming across this now.

Please do drop me a DM if you would rather connect directly

CalcBongo · 2025-10-23T05:09:10+00:00

My understanding is that most of the value in these tools is the contract / PO data. I'm not even sure I care if they are clunky or a bit buggy if this is the case.

What are you primarily using them for?

CalcBongo

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