The federal government has collected data from colleges and universities for more than a century. However, how and what data are collected has evolved over time, as has the purposes for collecting those data. The most systematic collection of data happens through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), which is required to be reported by any institution that awards federal student aid. While initially collected to describe the state of postsecondary education in the United States to policymakers, a shift in recent decades has focused on making data available to students and parents to compare institutions. Now, the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act of 1965 is overdue and one proposed change--moving from an institution-level to a student-level data collection--would transform IPEDS. We trace the beginnings of federal data collection from institutions to its current state and discuss how the data collection has evolved over time.