Data that show how specific groups of students and borrowers experience higher education can help policymakers better understand the complexities of the issues they are working on. Specific and contextualized data can inform policy debates, policy decisions, and policy recommendations.

Workforce data provide essential context for understanding how postsecondary education contributes to economic conditions and opportunities. Including measures such as employment, earnings, and industry of work allows the PNPI Explorer to present a more complete picture of how education and the workforce may intersect across communities.

Curated Reports allow users to access reports focused on specific types of metrics for the state, congressional district, or U.S. territory (geography) of their choosing: postsecondary enrollment and access, college cost, postsecondary completion and attainment, student debt, student loan repayment, and workforce. The Curated Topline Report provides data from all six areas. Under Build Custom Reports, the Report Builder allows users to display up to six metrics of their choosing for their selected geography; the Comparison Tool allows users to plot metrics for a chosen geography against other states, other districts in a state, or other U.S. territories; and the Trend Explorer allows users to see how a metric of their choosing has changed in their chosen geography over time.

The PNPI Explorer provides immediate, direct access to data that can inform policy debates, decisions, and recommendations while building the decision-making capacity of individuals, systems, and organizations in our space. Among the tool’s most exciting features are the congressional district–level insights, the ability to view trends over time (10 years), the ability to view postsecondary and workforce data, the variety of data sources, the ease of use, and the near-instant display of easily consumable data. Plus, all data, tables, and charts can be easily exported for sharing and further analysis.

To learn more about our methodology, data sources, code, and data files, consult our Data & Methodology page. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions, please fill out the feedback form or email us at explorerhelp@pnpi.org.

If you have questions about the PNPI Explorer or need assistance with a query, please contact us at explorerhelp@pnpi.org.

The PNPI Explorer now offers the option to embed complete reports and single graphs or charts on external websites and blogs. This allows for a navigable interface located outside of PNPI’s website. To embed the PNPI Explorer on your site, you should navigate to the bottom of the report and click “Share,” followed by “Embed whole page.” You can also embed a single graph or chart by clicking “Single-graph Embeds.”

Absolutely! At the bottom of each report in the PNPI Explorer, you can find a link that says “Export Data.” Clicking this link will download all the data needed to create a report in JSON format. On our Data & Methodology page, you will find all the data and Stata code needed to recreate our data files.

The PNPI Explorer is compatible with all web browsers. For best results, use Google Chrome, Firefox, or Microsoft Edge.

Yes, but the tool is optimized for desktop use, so some features may be more challenging to view on a smaller screen.

Preferred citation:

PNPI (2026). The PNPI Explorer. Postsecondary National Policy Institute. Retrieved from pnpi.org/explorer.

Curated Reports are pre-populated summaries of data on the most commonly used metrics across specific issue areas, allowing users to access reports focused on specific types of metrics for the state, congressional district, or U.S. territory (geography) of their choice. Custom Reports enable users to create their own reports using any combination of available metrics. Custom Reports also allow users to examine metrics over time or compare their selected geography with others, matching states with states, districts within a state with other districts, or territories with other territories.

Curated Reports are available on postsecondary enrollment and access, college cost, postsecondary completion and attainment, student debt, student loan repayment, and workforce measures. The Curated Topline Report provides data from all six areas.

The PNPI Explorer offers three types of Custom Reports: The Report Builder allows users to display six metrics of their choosing for their selected geography; the Comparison Tool allows users to plot metrics for a chosen geography against other states, other districts in a state, or among U.S. territories; and the Trend Explorer allows users to see how a metric of their choosing has changed in their chosen geography over time.

For metrics displayed in Curated Reports and the Report Builder, you can learn more about them by clicking on the circled question mark in the top right corner of the metric. For metrics displayed in the Comparison Tool and Trend Explorer, please consult our glossary and methodology report.

The Comparison Tool in the Custom Reports section will allow you to compare any selected congressional district to all other districts in the same state for your chosen metric. You can also compare district averages to state and national averages. The Comparison Tool also allows you to select states or territories as your geography and provides comparisons at those levels. For example, if your selected geography is a state, the Comparison Tool will automatically provide comparisons to the other 49 states and Washington, D.C.

If you choose to download a report, you can do so as a PDF. This PDF is formatted to include only the data you selected without header information. Files can be readily converted to images for inclusion in papers or presentations.

There are several ways to share or save reports. In the bottom-right corner of the PNPI Explorer, next to the PNPI logo, there are buttons labeled “Share” and “PDF.” The “Share” button provides an option to “Share link to current page.” This will give you a custom URL linked to the exact report you have generated. Saving or sharing this link will allow you and others to view your report with the same geography and metrics you’ve chosen. The “PDF” button provides an option to “Print whole page.” Clicking this button will bring you to your browser’s print dialogue, where you can choose to print your report or save it to a PDF file that can be shared with others or saved to your computer.

In the bottom-right corner of the PNPI Explorer, next to the PNPI logo, there is a button labeled “PDF.” When you are viewing a Curated Report or using the Report Builder, this button provides an option to “Print single section,” with download buttons listed after each graph or chart. This feature allows you to print either every graph/chart in your report or a single graph or chart. You can also save one or more graphs/charts to a PDF for sharing with others or saving to your computer.

The PNPI Explorer integrates data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), the College Scorecard, the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS), and the Federal Student Aid (FSA) Data Center. Aside from federal student loan repayment data, which reflect pre-COVID-19 estimates (2019 data), the Explorer represents data from 2023. Trend data are presented over a 10-year span (2013–2023). To learn more about our methodology, data sources, code, and data files, consult our Data & Methodology page.

The PNPI Explorer relies on the American Community Survey because it is the only federal dataset that provides consistent, nationwide workforce measures at the national, state, territory, and congressional district levels. Its standardized methodology supports reliable comparisons across geographies and over time.

The PNPI Explorer relies on publicly available federal datasets, several of which are released annually. The PNPI Explorer is updated when all of our sources have released the same new data year.

In some cases, institutions were excluded. This was done primarily to ensure the data’s accuracy and relevance. Institutions were excluded for one of the following reasons:

• The institutions are listed in FSA as being a campus outside of the United States;
• The institutions do not match to IPEDS geographic characteristics (they have no linking FIPS);
• The institutions are outside of the Office of Postsecondary Education (OPE) universe;
• The institutions are in territories which are not exclusively affiliated with the United States (Marshall Islands and Federated Republic of Micronesia);
• The institutions are exclusively online (and thus do not link to a geography);
• The institutions have 66% or more of their undergraduate enrollment exclusively online;
• The institutions are not degree-granting; or
• The institutions do not participate in federal Title IV programs.

The PNPI Explorer does not report a single, direct measure of return on investment or gainful employment. Instead, it provides a range of complementary indicators, such as educational attainment, student debt, repayment outcomes, earnings, and workforce participation, that users can examine together to inform their own assessments of economic outcomes.

Users cannot include or exclude specific institutions in the current iteration of the PNPI Explorer.

The displayed data do not necessarily reflect only residents of a given geography. Data from IPEDS, the College Scorecard, and the Federal Student Aid Data Center are measured at the institution level and reflect students who are enrolled in or attended institutions located in a state, congressional district, or territory, regardless of where those students live or ultimately reside after graduation. By contrast, workforce data from the Census American Community Survey are based on respondents’ place of residence and may include individuals who live in one geography but work in another.

Education and workforce measures describe characteristics of the same geographic area, but they are not linked at the individual level and do not track the same people across outcomes. Data in the Explorer can be used to explore broad patterns within a place, but they should not be interpreted as person-level or causal relationships.

While there is evidence that indicates that educational outcomes can contribute to workforce outcomes, and vice versa, these relationships are often nuanced and complex. For this reason, data from the Explorer should not be interpreted causally.

The PNPI Explorer uses the most recent congressional district boundaries available as of our data year (2023). Please note that some districts may have changed since 2023 due to litigation or legislative action.

In some cases, there may not be data for your selection. There are three primary instances in which you may find missing data:

• Cases where data are missing for an entire geography. In this case, data may be missing because the district does not yet have corresponding higher education data from IPEDS or the College Scorecard; the district no longer exists but did at some point between 2012 and 2022, so data appear only in the Trend Explorer (and nowhere else); or the district currently exists but there are no institutions in the district that meet our inclusion criteria (elaborated on below and in our methodological report). For territories, data may be missing for an entire report or a single metric because the data are unavailable for the territory or the territory’s data are suppressed by the federal government due to small sample sizes.

• Cases where data are missing for some metrics but not others. This may be due to the metric in question not applying to any institution in the selected district. For instance, if there are no public institutions in a district, the State Appropriations for Public Institutions metric will not display any information. In other cases, an institution may report some information to IPEDS but not all of it. This may be because of differing reporting requirements by metric (e.g., enrollment size or other criteria). In this case, there would be data for some metrics but not others.

• Cases where data for a given metric are missing for some types of institutions but not others (e.g., public four-year institutions, public two-year institutions, or for-profit institutions). This may be due to reporting adherence and requirements. It could be that an institution or collection of institutions did not report data on specific metrics (e.g., adherence), or that an institution’s or institutions’ data on specific metrics were suppressed for privacy reasons (e.g., enrollment numbers are small). In these cases, you may see reported numbers for some types of institutions and “not reported” for other kinds of institutions.

Any data suppressed by federal sources to protect student privacy are treated as missing. We do not estimate or fill in suppressed values.

In some cases, we use percentages to show the breakdown of each category for a given metric. For example, we can display the percentage of students who received a Pell Grant, because 100% of the population either did or did not receive a Pell Grant. 

In other cases, we display rates to compare across different groups. For example, variables related to completion rate are unlikely to sum to 100% because different sectors have different completion rates (e.g., at one type of institution, 74% of students may complete, while at another kind of institution, 47% may complete). The PNPI Explorer displays the individual rates for each sector in a single graph, allowing users to compare student completion rates across different types of institutions easily.

Percentages show how the workforce in a place is distributed across industries, making it easier to compare economic structure across geographies of different sizes. Counts show the total number of workers in each supersector, illustrating the scale and concentration of employment.

In some cases, we have combined FSA and IPEDS data into a single metric. Due to differences in reporting requirements, some institutions report their FSA data at their main campus and their IPEDS data at each satellite campus. For a more detailed explanation and additional analytical information related to this, see our Data & Methodology page.

Due to rounding, some percentages displayed may not add up to 100%.

No. Our data only include loan information for the federal student loan programs.

While most data reflected in the PNPI Explorer are from 2023, repayment data are an exception. Repayment metrics from the College Scorecard are from 2019 due to the repayment pause/disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic.