Thanks DreamSchool! I appreciate the info (I was away for a week or so or would have thanked you sooner!).
If of help to anyone else, here is my understanding based upon the replies above and some digging around:
■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ and diycollegerankings are both populated primarily with IPEDS data. But diycollegerankings probably updates its product on a more timely basis to reflect “provisional” updates to IPED than the collegeresults website (which I think as of now updates once a year it looks like). The currently released “provisional” and “final release” IPEDS data sets can be found listed here:
https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/datacenter/login.aspx?gotoReportId=3
So for admissions data for example, the provisional data is out for 2014-15 and the final data is out for 2013-14 (and before).
The upshot, as far as I can tell, is that ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ is populated with admissions data for students who entered college in fall 2013 (as Dreamschool helpfully explained), while the diycollegerankings spreadsheet would include admissions data for students who entered in the fall of 2014. That’s b/c college results uses only final data and the DIY website updates its product upon release of provisional data.
Collegeresults would presumably catch up in the spring - its website says it updates its database once a year in the spring.
On the other hand, collegeresults is free. So if choosing between the two at the moment (versus in the spring for example), it may come down to a personal choice of whether the more up-to-date provisional info and the database of all schools provided by DIY is worth the price versus collegeresults, which has admissions data that is a year older and from which you would export data from schools you identify (rather than receive a spreadsheet including all schools). I should note I have not purchased diycollegerankings, at least not yet, so am only giving info based on digging around.
As for the US News & World Report’s College Compass, I found one online discussion of that website from last year that said search results are not exportable or downloadable from College Compass to Excel or otherwise (and apparently a similar product Money Magazine’s website offers also does not allow searches to be downloaded/exported). I’ve emailed the US News folks to ask them directly and will post any response I receive.
Two other options based on helpful replies above:
As far as I can tell, the college board’s search tool limits the schools that can be compared to three at a time, I’m not sure it is exportable, and the data seems limited.
The government’s College Navigator is an interesting option. It appears the admission data available through it is for the college class that entered in 2015 (some of the other data fields are populated by data from 2014 - it varies by data field). So it is the most up to date. You can export search results, and by using the compare function you can export helpful info for more than one school at a time. Even if the number of schools that can be compare dis limited, you can always clear, start a new search, export that data, and cut-and-paste it all into one spreadsheet after exported. But, base don the way the data is exported, there doe snot seem to be a particularly easy way to sort it (unlike collegeresults or diycollegerankings, which allow you to easily sort schools by any of the downloaded variables).
Finally, you can do searches on the IPEDS website itself, including searches using the most recent provisional data sets. You can do the searches across the IPED variables you select. I don;t think the search results are downloadable through. It does appear you can download the entire data set in a specified format for use in statistical applications - it could be that gives you the same sort of thing that diycollegerankings does, but at first blush ta least it looks to me like the data isn’t downloaded in Excel format - could be it is easy to dump into Excel, I don’t know. I probably need to dig there a little more to figure out exactly what you can export from the site.
All told, what I’ve found out is that it does not appear to be real easy to download a sortable spreadsheet of schools with lots of data from the most recent admissions class (entered fall of 2015). Collegeresults is 2013 data at the moment, diycollegerankings is 2014 data, college navigator is 2015 but its output is a little less flexible/easy to sort/manipulate, college board is limited in a number of ways, and US News’ College Compass does not allow downloading of sortable spreadsheets at all it appears.
Hope that makes sense and helps someone - maybe just to decide the best way is the old-fashioned one of creating one’s own spreadsheet and filling in the data one cares about most by hand! Thanks very much all!
But it really is a very valuable tool.