Using Administrative Data to Reduce Education Data Collection Burden

Traditionally, survey data have been considered the gold standard for education data collection. The many benefits of using traditional survey questions to collect data include researchers getting to ask the questions they want and being able to collect the same data consistently on all respondents.

However, researchers live in a world of increasing constraints. Survey research is expensive, and survey response rates have declined significantly. People are not as likely to respond to emails, text messages, and phone calls as they used to be, so researchers must invest more in outreach or face lower response rates and data that are not representative. Because of these challenges, the federal government is prioritizing solutions that make education surveys more efficient and cost-effective. 

Administrative data are one potential solution to the challenges of rising costs and declining education survey response rates. These data include any records that are collected and stored by non-researchers (i.e., commercial entities or federal, state, and local governments) for administrative purposes. In short, they are data that already exist about individuals that researchers can repurpose for their own work.

Examples of Administrative Data Sources

Many administrative data sources are available to researchers. One source used for RTI’s postsecondary education surveys is the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC), an educational nonprofit that collects and reports student-level data (i.e., student enrollment and completion records) on behalf of postsecondary institutions. Instead of asking respondents in an education survey when they graduated, researchers can request NSC data to save time. Another data source used for education surveys is the U.S. Department of Education’s National Student Loan Data System (NSLDS), which collects data for the administration of federal financial aid funding. 

We are also testing out additional administrative data sources to save time and money on our education longitudinal studies.  For example, data from Experian, a credit monitoring platform, provides high-quality data on young adults’ income and employment status after graduating high school or college and entering the workforce. This administrative data allows us to conduct large federal surveys at reduced cost because we can rely more on existing data and design shorter surveys.  

Exploring the Benefits of Administrative Data 

Surveys are still critical for obtaining important data from respondents, but administrative data offer many benefits. Thus, federal agencies are very interested in using these sources to make survey research more efficient and cost-effective. 

Benefits of using administrative data include the following:

1. Cost-Effectiveness: Getting access to administrative data is cheaper because of how much time and effort goes into designing, testing, and executing a large survey.
2. Shorter Surveys: Most education surveys only take respondents about 30 minutes to complete, but people are less willing to respond than they used to be. By supplementing survey data with administrative records, researchers can design shorter surveys that focus on questions that cannot be answered otherwise. In addition, using administrative data saves researchers time, since it requires less time to design and program the survey and collect the data.
3. Replicability: Administrative data can be replicated easily. Once administrative data are obtained and processed, researchers can use them the next year and update them in real time. With traditional survey research, researchers typically redesign and update the survey and conduct field tests to ensure that the questions make sense and that people will respond well to them.
4. Accuracy: Although administrative data are not tailored to survey researchers’ specific needs, they may be more accurate because the data source is an official record, rather than a respondent’s recalled experience. For example, a survey respondent might not remember exactly how much they borrowed in loans and may just give their best guess. In contrast, administrative records from the NSLDS provide an accurate, objective picture of that respondent’s loan information because the data come from the federal government. 

Administrative data can be an invaluable strategy to make survey research more efficient, but they too have challenges. For example, using administrative data is often cheaper and faster than traditional survey research, but data access and data use agreements can be complicated and time consuming, depending on the data source.

In addition, the administrative data may not provide the exact information a researcher wants to know about a respondent. When designing a survey, researchers can include the exact fields they want. For example, a traditional survey can ask for the respondent’s salary in their first job out of college. In contrast, administrative credit records may only include the job a person reported when filling out their most recent credit application, which could have been months or years ago, and at a different point in time than others in the data. Researchers only get the data available, and it might not be consistent across individuals or tailored to researchers’ needs.

Finding the Right Approach for Your Education Data Collection

Survey research is expensive, and—with declining response rates—the federal government is looking for strategies to make traditional survey research more efficient. Although traditional survey research may still be the gold standard, administrative data can be a useful option to help address the time and budget constraints that survey researchers are facing. 

When approaching any research survey, it is important to find a solution that meets each client’s specific needs. At RTI, we are committed to working with our federal, state, local, nonprofit, and foundation clients to find the right survey approach that meets their time and budgetary needs while collecting the best, most representative data possible.

Learn more about our work in surveys and data collection.