University of California ClioMetric History Project

UC – CHP Director and Lead Researcher – Zach Bleemer – UC Berkeley Economics

CSHE PI – John Aubrey Douglass – Senior Research Fellow Public Policy and Higher Education

The year 2018 will mark the 150th anniversary of the chartering of the University of California, the most prestigious university system in the world. This important anniversary provides an opportunity to reflect on the history of the University and contemplate its future.

The University of California ClioMetric History Project (UC-CHP) will take a Big Data approach to exploring the history and role of the UC campuses in the state of California.  The project will produce an unprecedented large-scale empirical examination of the university’s funding, students, professors, institutional structure, and the university’s impact on socioeconomic mobility and economic development. Public and restricted-access databases will include comprehensive student and faculty records, course catalogs, Regent’s and campus budget reports, and similar institutional records and documents from 1900 to the present. We will also present novel statistical analysis of these databases through blog posts, topic briefs, and academic working papers.

Clio was the muse of history in Greek mythology and the term cliometric refers to the use of data and quantitative methods to explore history.

The scope and magnitude of UC ClioMetric History Project is enabled by modern computational technology—allowing the digitization and statistical analysis of massive amounts of administrative data presently archived on paper records.

In its first phase, UC-CHP is collecting, digitizing, and analyzing complete UC student records from the first half of the 20th century and UC faculty, course, and budget data covering the past 100 years. For more information on data collection and analysis, see the UC-CHP Homepage.

For further information on the UC-CHP contact: Zach Bleemer bleemer@berkeley.edu

UC ClioMetric History - Research Goals

The project has four major areas of research that are being explored in collaboration with interested scholars and practitioners.

UC ClioMetric History - Data Sets

The project is pursuing analysis via a Macro and Micro approach to the data.

UC ClioMetric History Links