New College Catalog Study (CCS)

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Steve Brint, Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley, has generated with colleagues a new College Catalog Study (CCS) database which includes data on 294 four-year colleges and universities, a subset of institutions drawn from the Institutional Data Archive. The database tracks every change in major academic units (schools and colleges), departments in arts and sciences, departments in professional schools, interdisciplinary degree-granting programs, and general education requirements over a 25-year period, 1975 through 2000. For schools and departments, changes in structure were coded, including new units, name changes, splits in units, units moved to new schools, reconstituted units, consolidated units, departments becoming programs, and eliminated units. Coding is based on college catalogs obtained from CollegeSource, Inc.

As in the Brint team’s other higher education database, the Institutional Data Archive (IDA), the data are organized in a panel design, where measurements are taken at five year intervals: 1975-76, 1980-81, 1985-86, 1990-91, 1995-96, and 2000-01. Data were collected on every IDA institution for which a full set of catalogs was available. In cases in which data were not available for a target year, catalogs from the adjacent later year were used. The larger and more complex institutions, and those with difficult-to-interpret catalogs, were coded independently by two coders.

CCS data can be easily merged with IDA through unique institutional identifiers used in both databases.

The National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the Atlantic Philanthropies provided support for the construction of the College Catalog Study Database.

CCS can be downloaded from the Colleges & Universities 2000 website: www.higher-ed2000.ucr.edu.

Suggested reference: Steven Brint, Lori Turk-Bicakci, Kristopher Proctor, and Scott P. Murphy. 2008. The College Catalog Study Database. Riverside, CA: University of California, Riverside.

Steven Brint is Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean of the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at UC Riverside.

Contact:
Steven Brint
steven.brint@ucr.edu

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