A Free IPEDS Report Builder That Never Sees Your Student File

The free IPEDS report builder at apollosrm.com/tools/ipeds is for registrars and financial aid staff at private career colleges. You upload one student spreadsheet, and it works out your 2026-27 Completions, 12-month Enrollment, Fall Enrollment, Graduation Rates and Student Financial Aid figures, lays them out the way the Data Collection System shows them, and writes draft import files for your keyholder. It reads and computes the file in your browser, so your student data never reaches us.

Why is IPEDS still a spreadsheet exercise at most career colleges?

Because the numbers live in three places and the forms ask about a fourth. Enrollment sits in the student system, aid sits in another export, and the completions list is somebody’s workbook. Then each screen wants its own cut: who counts as first-time, which date decides the fall population, how a student with no recorded sex gets counted. So the week before a window closes, someone builds pivot tables and hopes the totals agree across screens.

The 2026-27 collection has three windows. Fall opens September 16 and closes for keyholders on October 28. Winter opens December 9 and closes February 10. Spring opens the same day and closes April 7. Coordinators get a couple of extra weeks after each keyholder close. The tool shows a countdown in whole days, because we know the dates but not the hour each window shuts.

What does the free tool produce?

For each report your file can support, you get a dashboard of the headline numbers, tables laid out like the DCS screens, and a note on every screen naming the choices that shaped it. You also get a data-quality score with a plain list of what to fix, a PDF, an Excel workbook, and draft import files written to the layouts NCES publishes for 2026-27.

The tool is candid about what a student file can and cannot answer. Completions, 12-month Enrollment, Fall Enrollment and Student Financial Aid are computed from the file. Graduation Rates are computed when your file reaches back to the 2023 entrants. If it does not, you type the cohort and the tool lays it out and writes the file from what you typed. Institutional Characteristics, Cost, Finance and Human Resources are not in a student file, so those come as laid-out worksheets for the right office to fill in.

If you want a sense of it before touching real data, the tool can hand you a sample file for a made-up school and run it end to end.

Why does the file never leave your browser?

Because we built it that way on purpose. Your browser reads the spreadsheet, does the math, draws the charts and builds the downloads on your own computer. There is no upload step, so there is nothing of yours for us to store, lose or hand over.

This matters because student records are protected by FERPA, and sending a student-level file to a vendor is a decision your school should make deliberately. With this tool you never have to make it. If your file has names, Social Security numbers or other identifiers, the tool ignores those columns before anything else happens and tells you which ones it skipped. Your own rules for student data still cover the copies on your computer and the reports you download, and we are not your lawyer.

Three things do reach us. The first time you click in the tool, a short popup asks for your name, work email, phone number and school, plus a consent sentence. It appears before you add any file, so it cannot carry a student record or a single number from your data. We save one small cookie in your browser holding a random lead number, never your contact details, so we do not ask again, and if you come back we note the visit (the page and your language, nothing else) so the same person can follow up. The third is a school search: when you type a school name, the text goes to our public school list to find matches.

What does the sex-unknown line mean in 2026-27, and how does the tool handle it?

For 2026-27, NCES asks for Male and Female on every screen and a separate Sex unknown total on some of them. On the screens with no unknown row, students without a recorded sex still have to land in Male or Female somewhere.

The tool makes that your choice instead of burying it. By default it splits unknowns in proportion to the known Male and Female students in each cell. You can type your own split, or use a seeded random assignment that gives the same answer every time you run the same file. Whichever you pick is written on every screen, in the PDF and in the workbook. NCES also lists assigning by name as a common method. We never read names, so we do not offer it.

What does the tool not do?

It does not file anything. ApolloSRM is not affiliated with the National Center for Education Statistics, and the tool never connects to the Data Collection System. Your keyholder reviews the figures and the draft import files, then uploads them. NCES decides which forms apply to your school from your IC and screening answers, so confirm in the DCS that each form is the one you expect.

It does not produce Institutional Characteristics, Cost, Finance or Human Resources figures, and it has no import files for them, because those layouts were not part of what we verified. It is built for private career colleges first. Four-year schools get their own enrollment, graduation-rate and completions screens with graduate students counted apart, but not the Academic Libraries or ACTS surveys. And peer comparisons appear only where public federal data is loaded for schools like yours, and only when at least five peer schools have the figure. Think of it as a flight check before the window opens: it tells you what your file supports and where the gaps are while there is still time to fix them.

Where does this go next?

Schools that run ApolloSRM get the same engine working on their live student record, so there is no spreadsheet to build the week before a window closes. The report is computed from the records you already keep, every gap links to the screen where you fix it, and a filed report is frozen so a later change shows up as a difference instead of overwriting what you sent. Your keyholder still reviews and files. If you are curious what that looks like, ask for a demo. And if your file surprises you, the data-quality list is the place to begin.