ABSTRACT
When traveling, be it for business or pleasure, we tend to compare and contrast our new location with more familiar surroundings. The new location may be bigger or smaller, more or less diverse, or warmer or colder than our current home. Having a common set of criteria for evaluation allows us to make comparisons and acclimate. The same is true for higher education institutions, for which a national database provides a common set of definitions and variables for each institution, making it possible to compare more than 7,000 institutions that submit federal data to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) each year.
