Matching Higher Education Institutions

This project builds a system to standardize university names across multiple higher education datasets by matching them to unique institutional identifiers (UNITIDs). Students will develop and refine a fuzzy matching algorithm that automates this process, using a manually curated training dataset of institutions. This standardized data environment allows Boston University (BU) to be accurately compared with peer institutions across national higher education datasets. Students will investigate what the standardized datasets reveal about where BU is most impactful compared to other universities – particularly in research activity and grant funding. With additional data sources (such as research funding databases and OpenAlex affiliation records), students will explore BU’s strengths across academic areas and departments.