Your peers, in plain English, on data you can actually trust

Primarily IPEDS, the federal database that every U.S. college and university reports to, covering enrollment, retention and graduation, finance, faculty, and admissions. Clema pulls the matching survey components for each institution in your peer set and shows the IPEDS source and year with every figure, so you can verify it. Beyond IPEDS, Clema can pull the other federal datasets it connects (College Scorecard, PSEO, STATS, BLS, EADA, and more) for the same peer set.

The manual route is the NCES IPEDS Data Center and its Compare Institutions tool: you look up each institution by UnitID, pick the survey variables, and export the results to reconcile in a spreadsheet. Clema runs the same joins on the same IPEDS data from a plain-English question, returning a sourced comparison table in minutes instead of a multi-step export.

You do. Name the institutions directly, paste an existing list, or describe the group in plain English (for example, public R2 universities in our region) and Clema assembles it for your review. Because strategic peers, admissions competitors, and Carnegie classification peers are usually three different lists, you can keep separate sets and benchmark against whichever one a question calls for.

Clema gives you a head start instead of a blank page. It reads the comparison group in your IPEDS Data Feedback Report (DFR) and the peer list published on your own website, then proposes a starting peer set for you to confirm or adjust. You can also upload your own peer list to begin. However the set starts, you stay in control of who counts as a peer.

The Data Feedback Report is an annual report from NCES that summarizes an institution's reported IPEDS data in charts and benchmarks it against a set of peer institutions, called the comparison group. NCES typically releases the standard DFR in late fall or early winter and emails it to the institution's primary IPEDS keyholder (and coordinators, if it has them), then to the president or CEO about two weeks later. It uses provisional data from the previous fall-to-spring IPEDS collection cycle. Anyone can open any institution's current and past DFRs in the Data Feedback Report tool on the IPEDS Use the Data site.

If your institution has created a custom comparison group, the standard DFR uses it, and NCES keeps using it each year until the primary IPEDS keyholder changes it. If not, NCES generates an automatic comparison group. For degree-granting institutions it is based on control, Carnegie Classification, and enrollment size; for non-degree-granting institutions, on control, largest program of study, and enrollment size. The standard report shows only one comparison group, and automatic groups can shift a little from year to year as institutional characteristics change.

Only the primary IPEDS keyholder can change the custom comparison group used in the standard DFR, in the IPEDS Data Collection System (surveys.nces.ed.gov/ipeds), using each peer's UnitID. Changes for the standard report must be made between mid-January and mid-July. Outside that window, or for a one-off comparison, anyone can build a custom DFR or a Statistical Analysis Report in the DFR tool against a group of their choice: 1 to 100 institutions, with at least 3 needed to calculate a comparison group median. In Clema you can keep several peer sets side by side and benchmark against any of them without waiting for next year's report.

Yes, for the data side. You define the aspirational target group (the institutions you want to resemble on a multi-year horizon) and Clema compares your current IPEDS metrics against theirs. The forward-looking judgment about which institutions belong in that set stays with your leadership; Clema does the data assembly and comparison.

For routine comparisons, the gap is large: work that took days of downloading, cleaning, and aligning IPEDS files becomes a question answered in minutes. Complex, multi-source analyses still benefit from your interpretation, so think of Clema as removing the repetitive data wrangling, not replacing your analytical judgment.

Both. Clema returns a sortable comparison with a peer median for context, and it can summarize the same result as a plain-English narrative for a board deck, accreditation self-study, or cabinet memo. Every number keeps its IPEDS source so the underlying figures stay defensible.