Postsecondary Student Coursework

Highlights

Record Level: Student by course by school year session by institution 
Record Count: 5 million observations/year beginning in 2010 
Years Covered: 2010-Present* 
Population Coverage: Students enrolled in or receiving an award from a Michigan public institution, as well as some out of state students from NSC.

The coursework dataset includes one record per student, for each course the student is enrolled in at all institutions and school year session (for example, fall 2010-2011). For each record, session beginning and end dates are provided. Additionally, the dataset includes relevant course variables such as course subject and title, CIP-code, and whether the course is a remedial course. Student-course variables are also included such as credit hours attempted/completed and final grade awarded.

Researchers should note the following about the datafile: First, unfortunately, there is no linkage between AP/higher level coursetaking in K12 and credit awarded as a postsecondary student. Second, it can at times be difficult to identify which postsecondary courses are lower vs. upper-level courses. As a workaround, a combination of enrollment and graduation data was used to determine (for each student) their arrival date at the institution and the years since they had arrived at the institution for all subsequent years. These data was then merged onto the postsecondary course data to determine -- for a given course -- the proportion of pre-college students, first year students, second year students, etc. The lower-level courses are considered those with >50% pre-college and first-year students. Some institutions also have the standard 100-level to 400-level course coding, which was used to validate the approach described above. Finally, the “ENROLLMENT_LEVEL” variable is often missing. All values indicating grades earned are left as reported by the institutions, which explains why there are some inconsistencies across institutions in measures such as the “ihe_gpa_term” variable, or in values reported as grades.

* Years covered includes any year for which there is data available in this file. However, researchers should note that these data encompass the academic histories of any student receiving an award beginning with the 2010 school year. As such, the base file “years covered” encompasses 2010, but all other files may include earlier records as well.