The University of Illinois has a wealth of dataset information about student enrollment, progress, graduation, first career destinations, and educational satisfaction. These datasets have been collected from student information systems as well as student and alumni surveys at regular intervals over the course of many years. Many are already publicly available although difficult to find by information seekers because they are housed in many locations. Collecting these resources into one point of access for users streamlines the research stage and also takes advantage of the many resources that are available locally but may not be widely visible to most users.
The University of Illinois Educational Research Datasets collection brings together into a coherent whole a variety of datasets about student demographics, life and education at Illinois, with information about all student populations, including undergraduate, graduate, and professional students. The main purpose of this collection is to raise awareness and facilitate discovery of complementary datasets to support inquiry and research about the Illinois student experience. In addition to locally collected information, higher educational datasets, including information about Illinois, are available through the research and support of federal agencies such as the U.S. Department of Education and the National Science Foundation. This is a purely digital collection, only accessible via our website, including resources such as the following:
LOCAL
The U of I Campus Profile contains 10 years of centrally-provided indicators for each department, with school, college, and campus totals. The data are updated once per year in late November. Documentation is improved continuously: http://www.dmi.illinois.edu/
U of I senior survey: http://cte.illinois.edu/outcomes/seniorsurv.html
U of I first destination survey and data: https://www.careercenter.illinois.edu/research/firstdestination
Graduate College data sources: http://www.grad.illinois.edu/graduate-college-data-databases
Graduate survey, collected from 1973 to 2012. Results archived in the University Office of Planning and Budgeting: http://www.pb.uillinois.edu/dr/gs/.
NATIONAL
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) is the core postsecondary education data collection program for the National Center for Education Statistics, a part of the Institute for Education Sciences within the United States Department of Education: https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/
Data.gov: https://www.data.gov/education/
National Center for Educational Statistics: https://nces.ed.gov/datatools/index.asp?DataToolSectionID=4
Survey of Earned Doctorates (NORC): http://www.norc.org/Research/Projects/Pages/survey-of-earned-doctorates-(sed).aspx
NRC Assessment of Research Doctoral Programs: http://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/Resdoc/
U.S. Department of Education scorecard: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/
Council of Graduate Schools, data on first time enrollment in doctoral programs: http://cgsnet.org/october-2015-gradedge
Council of Graduate Schools, graduate enrollment and degrees report: http://cgsnet.org/graduate-enrollment-and-degrees-fine-field-2004-2014
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The collection is available as a resource for our three main user groups: students and parents; administration, faculty, and staff; and educational researchers. Our collection includes many resources compiled by entities that collect data on a national level, about a variety of higher education institutions, as well as data collected by the University of Illinois regarding the current demographic makeup, surveys regarding personal satisfaction of students attending the U of I, and so on.
By opening up the accessibility of these datasets to a wider audience of users, the hope is for collaborations to be made among educational researchers and connections to be made in the minds of campus administrators in order to improve the student experience.
Resources
Johnston, Lisa R. (2014). Developing a Data Curation Service: Step #1: Work With What You’ve Got. Bulletin of the Association for Information Science & Technology 40(4): 45-47.
Mandell, Rachel (2013). Making Data Available: The UCLA Data Registry. Bulletin of the Association for Information Science & Technology 39(5): 52-53.