The UC Office of the President’s Institutional Research and Academic Planning group has partnered with the UC ClioMetric History Project, a project of UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education, to produce comprehensive interactive dashboards visualizing the demographics, enrollment and major choices, and long-run economic outcomes of each University of California campus’s alumni over the past 70 years. Because of the data collection limitations described below, the presented statistics don’t always perfectly match the UC Information Center’s contemporary enrollment and alumni wage dashboards, though any discrepancies are generally small. This page describes the data and methodology used in each longitudinal campus dashboard in more detail.
Each set of campus dashboards relies on two primary data sources. The first includes all available digitized student transcript records of enrolled UC undergraduates. Transcript availability depends on when each respective campus began maintaining digital records and UC-CHP’s ability to access and digitize some older scanned paper transcripts. See Bleemer (2018) for a detailed description of how historical paper transcripts are digitized into computer-readable records. Transcripts are available for students who enrolled at each campus in the following years: 1968-2015 (Berkeley), 1965-2016 (Santa Cruz), and 1986-2017 (Santa Barbara).
All student transcripts contain students’ campus, first enrollment year, majors, and completed courses. Ethnicity is available for all but the oldest student records. Birth year is not always available, so for the purpose of tracing out wages over alumni’s careers, we assume that first-time undergraduate enrollees are about 18 years old (though of course many are older). Because degree completion is imperfectly available in some cases, ‘alumni’ refers to any student who completed at least 10 courses at the campus.
The second data source includes the linked quarterly 2000-2020 California wages, industry of employment (six-digit NAICS code), and employment city and zip code of all individuals in the transcript database. Wages are summed to annual wages and inflation-adjusted to 2020, and the latest industry and zip code reported in a given year are assigned to that year. Wages are unavailable for students without reported social security numbers and exclude employment that is not covered by California unemployment insurance, including self-employment, federal employment, and out-of-state employment. Alumni with no observed employment in a given year are omitted from all employment analysis.
Courses and majors are consistently categorized across campuses into six disciplines: Humanities, Social Sciences, Natural Sciences, Engineering, Professional, and (for courses) Physical Education. Student ethnicity is categorized as either white, African American, Hispanic/Latinx, Asian, other, or not reported. We identify the total number of departments in which each student took courses as the total number of departments listed in the course section of their student transcript.
We define industries by two-digit NAICS codes, combining similar codes and separating out employees of their alma mater campus (identified by NAICS code and zip code). Individuals are defined as persisting with the same employer for x years if they had the same NAICS code and zip code x years prior; the same industry if they had the same NAICS code x years prior; and the same city if they had the same employer city x years prior.