Data Dictionary – Program Information
FICE | Program Name | CIP Code | Calendar
FICE
The Cost Study uses FICE codes as a method of assigning unique identifiers to participating institutions. While FICE codes were replaced by OPE ID and then the Federal School Code List, the study retains the practice of using 4-digit, and occasionally 5-digit, FICE codes in order to link historical records. Current participants can determine their FICE by logging into the web portal, and new institutions can continue to use their FICE code by looking at the last 4 digits of their code from the Federal School Code List. Please contact ire-cost@udel.edu if you would like to confirm your FICE before registration.
Program Name
You may assign the desired program name to the programs that your institution is including in the data submission. However, the data entry form in the web portal will display both the name that you assigned to the program and the official program name that corresponds with your programs’ CIPs.
CIP Code
The 2024 cycle of The Cost Study is following the 2020 updates to the CIP taxonomy. If you have previously participated in The Cost Study, and these changes affect your institution’s CIPs, please contact us at ire-cost@udel.edu before you complete your data submission so that we can work with you to make the necessary adjustments. Additionally, if you do change the CIP code of an existing program, we can now retain historical records in the portal under the previously assigned CIP code.
The Cost Study classifies instructional program specialties within educational institutions based on the Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) taxonomy, which was developed by the National Center for Education Statistics. Where possible, institutions should report at the 6-digit level in decimal format (e.g., 50.0409). If there is difficulty disaggregating programs within a specific disciplinary area, there is a general CIP Code level that should be used. Institutions may also report at the 4- or 2-digit level.
When preparing an upload file for your data submission, you should format column C (CIP for program) as ‘text’. Because the 2020 CIP codes differentiate between CIPs with trailing zeroes (e.g., 15, 15.00, and 15.0000), our database has been updated to recognize CIPs as a text/string field. Thus. the CIPs in your file must match the CIPs in the web portal exactly for the upload to work properly.
For CIPs with a leading zero, do not include the zero (e.g., use 1.1001 rather than 01.1001).
NOTES
- Within the CIP Code family 51.XXXX, we ask that you exclude programs if they reside exclusively in a medical school or college. We do accept Nursing, Pharmacy, Allied Health, and other similar programs, which typically reside outside of a medical school or college.
- You may include Military Science programs so long as they contain instructional activity and have their own instructional budget.
EXAMPLES
- In Engineering, CIP Code 14.XXXX, you should provide data for the engineering disciplines at your institution. Suppose you have five engineering programs – agricultural, chemical, civil, electrical, and mechanical. You would provide data for five discrete CIP Codes, i.e., 14.0301 (Agricultural Engineering), 14.0701 (Chemical Engineering), 14.0801 (Civil Engineering, General), 14.1001 (Electrical and Electronics Engineering), 14.1901 (Mechanical Engineering), etc., assuming that each of these programs has its own instructional budget. This pattern should be repeated across all curricular areas.
- If your Department of Foreign Languages offers French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Greek, and Latin, and you cannot cleanly disaggregate teaching workload and cost data into each of these disciplines, simply report the data as “Linguistic, Comparative, and Related Language Studies and Services,” CIP Code 16.01.
- If a disciplinary area provides no “general” option, and you cannot cleanly disaggregate to a specific curricular area, you may choose to report a 2-digit CIP code, e.g. Engineering Technologies And Engineering-Related Fields would be CIP Code 15.
Special Note for SUG Users: Members of the Southern Universities Group and a number of other institutions and consortia have asked to benchmark at the 6-digit CIP level. All participating institutions are encouraged to provide 6-digit CIP codes in as many instances as feasible to help accommodate these special data requests. Those data will then be rolled up to the 4-digit level, at which all institutions will be benchmarked when producing the national norm reports.
Calendar
For each of your programs, indicate its academic calendar. Make sure to select Quarter or Semester on the Data Entry Form in the web portal for each program, or include the appropriate values on your Excel spreadsheet during the data upload process. Note: Programs on a Trimester calendar should use the Quarter calendar option.
If a single program is on both a semester and quarter calendar (e.g., the undergraduate degree programs are on a semester calendar but the graduate degree program is on a quarter calendar), please notify ire-cost@udel.edu to ensure that we make the appropriate adjustments in our metric calculations.
College/School
To improve our new dashboard reporting tools, we have created a new (optional) variable for the 2023 and 2024 cycles that collects the name of the college, school, or unit for each program that you submit to the study. These codes will not be used to calculate any benchmark metrics and will only be used to sort your programs into groupings on our new institution dashboard. Due to space constraints on the dashboard, each grouping should only contain a maximum of 6 programs. For larger colleges/schools, please provide subgroupings (e.g., the College of Arts and Sciences – Social Sciences).
- If you do not wish to provide information about these groupings during data entry, enter an ‘m’ into the cell in the data upload or entry forms.
