The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) is a system of interrelated surveys conducted annually by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). IPEDS annually gathers information from about 6,400 colleges, universities, and technical and vocational institutions that participate in the federal student aid programs.

Access Database: To eliminate the step of downloading IPEDS separately by survey component or select variables, IPEDS has made available the entire survey data for one collection year in the Microsoft Access format beginning with the 2004-05 IPEDS data collection year. Each database contains the relational data tables as well as the metadata tables that describe each data table, the variable titles, descriptions and variables types. Value codes and value labels are also available for all categorical variables. When downloading an IPEDS Access Database, the file is compressed using WinZip.