ED - Update to Projections of Education Statistics - MRAS

The U.S. Department of Education, through the General Services Administration (GSA), is conducting market research to update its longstanding statistical series, "Projections of Education Statistics." This series, managed by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), has been a critical resource since 1964, providing essential data projections on various educational metrics such as enrollment numbers, teacher counts, graduation rates, educational expenditures, and degrees conferred. These projections are invaluable to federal and state policymakers, educational planners, researchers, and institutional administrators for strategic planning and resource allocation.

The current solicitation seeks to extend the projection horizon from the 2030 edition to 2035. The update will incorporate recent demographic and economic data that reflect post-pandemic realities and more current population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. The updated edition aims to maintain consistency with previous methodologies while documenting any necessary deviations. The final deliverables include a publication-ready report with detailed methodology appendices, supplementary data tables, and machine-readable files suitable for public release.

The scope of work covers six key domains: elementary and secondary enrollment; teacher numbers; high school graduates; public education expenditures; postsecondary institution enrollments; and degrees conferred at postsecondary institutions. The contractor will manage the complete production cycle from data acquisition to final report preparation ensuring all outputs adhere to NCES's statistical standards. This includes re-estimating models using recent data sources such as the Common Core of Data (CCD) and Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), among others.

Additionally, contractors are expected to employ diverse econometric models to ensure robust projections across national totals as well as state-level breakdowns by race/ethnicity and sex where applicable. They must also integrate updated macroeconomic forecasts into their analyses. All projection code will be archived on GitHub for transparency and future reference purposes.