Why doesn't the questionnaire ask about demographic information such as ethnicity? What other data are available as part of the UCUES dataset?

Institutional data, the administrative and transactional data collected by the university, are already collected and maintained at the individual level in application, registration, and degree databases and matched to the survey results.

Among the most important institutional variables are:

  • ethnicity
  • age
  • admission status (transfer admit or new-from-high school freshman admit)
  • term and year of admission (used to calculate year in school or unofficial class level)
  • units earned (used to calculate official class level)
  • date and title of degrees earned (for students who have graduated)
  • UC grade point average
  • major(s) (e.g. Integrative Biology) and college(s) (e.g. College of Letters & Science)
  • location of permanent address
  • international student status
  • high school grade point average and SAT scores
  • high school's Academic Performance Index ranking
  • participation in selected university-sponsored pre-college outreach and preparation programs

A few items already available in institutional data, such as gender, parental income, and parental education, are repeated in the survey to achieve greater completeness and detail. Summary financial aid data are likely to be included in future releases of UCUES data.

For administrative uses, any institutional data that identify individual students by student ID number can be linked to the UCUES data, from a roster of an intramural soccer team to a list of students who graduated from a particular high school or community college to a list of scholarship winners.