Data

Great Aspirations Data

The “Career Plans and Experiences of June 1961 College Graduates,” as the Great Aspirations data are formally called at ICPSR, is a panel study that surveyed college graduates in the Spring of 1961 (Wave A), 1962 (Wave B), 1963 (Wave C), 1964 (Wave D), and 1968 (Wave E). Each survey wave contains questions about career plans and goals, often compared with the graduate’s original plans, as well as attitudes about career fields. Additionally, Wave D contains a supplement for female respondents that assesses attitudes toward family and career decisions. Wave E, done seven years after graduation, includes many questions on respondents’ retrospective experiences of and satisfaction with their undergraduate institutions.

The initial sample was selected from college seniors intending to graduate in June 1961 from 135 colleges and universities in the US. The sample was selected using a two-stage probability sampling technique, in which colleges were selected from a group of eligible institutions and students were then selected from those colleges. All told, 41,116 individuals received surveys. The final sample from universities, liberal arts colleges, and teachers colleges contains 35,527 respondents, who form an unbalanced panel across the years.

 

The five waves of the original data used by Davis were archived with the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) as ICPSR 07344: “Career Plans and Experiences of June 1961, College Graduates.” The original data were in ASCII form with no dictionary. To remedy that I have constructed an update to the original housed at ICPSR, and can be accessed here. See Davis (1964) and the longer description of these data in the on-line Appendix to my book on my websie as well as the Princeton University Press website.

 

Compulsory Education and Child Labor Laws by State (1900 to 1939)

Data on state level compulsory education and child labor laws are provided.  The variables and all documentation are contained in the  Data Appendix to Mass Secondary Schooling and the State: The Role of State Compulsion and the High School Movement , by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz.  The STATA file covers 1910 to 1939 for all states.  A raw file, is provided for the 1900 to 1909 period for the first two variables (minimum and maximum ages of compulsory schooling).  A dictionary can be written and these data can be added to the larger file.

The 1915 Iowa State Census Project

The 1915 Iowa State Census is a unique document. It was the first census in the United States to include information on education and income prior to the United States Federal Census of 1940. It contains considerable detail on other aspects of individuals and households, e.g., religion, wealth and years in the United States and Iowa. The Iowa State Census of 1915 was a complete sample of the residents of the state and the returns were written by census takers (assessors) on index cards. These cards were kept in the Iowa State Archives in Des Moines and were microfilmed in 1986 by the Genealogical Society of Salt Lake City. The census cards were sorted by county, although large cities (those having more than 25,000 residents) were grouped separately. Within each county or large city, records were alphabetized by last name and within last name by first name. This data set includes individual-level records for three of the largest Iowa cities (Des Moines, Dubuque, and Davenport; the Sioux City films were unreadable) and for ten counties that did not contain a large city. (Additional details on sample selection are available in the documentation). Variables include name, age, place of residence, earnings, education, birthplace, religion, marital status, race, occupation, military service, among others. Data on familial ties between records are also included.

The 1915 Iowa State Census is a complete survey of Iowa residents in 1914. This data set, however, takes as its universe only three of the largest Iowa cities (Des Moines, Dubuque, and Davenport; the Sioux City films were unreadable) and ten counties that did not contain a large city. The counties were chosen by grouping the ninety-nine counties in Iowa into four equal units by the mean educational levels of their adult population and then randomly taking three from each of the four groups. None of the counties contained a large city. The rural counties span the geography of the state: Clay and Lyon in the northwest, Mitchell in the north central, Johnson and Buchanan in the east central, Marshall in the central, Wayne in the south central, Adair and Montgomery in the southwest, and Carroll in the west central. In the urban sample, we sampled every-other family name on each roll of microfilm chosen for the sample. For the rural sample, we sampled all names on each roll of microfilm chosen for the sample, and inferred familial relations as described for the urban sample. Altogether, the urban sample contains 26,768 observations or 5.5 percent of Iowa's population in large cities. The rural sample contains 33,305 observations or 1.8 percent of the population in counties without large cities.

The data from this project have been deposited with ICPSR and can be found at:
ICPSR Data Link

Rosters for Eleven U.S. Orchestras: 1930s to 1990s

"Orchestrating Impartiality: The Effect of 'Blind' Auditions on Female Musicians"
Goldin C, Rouse C. American Economic Review, Vol 90, Num 4. Sept 2000. pp. 715-744

The underlying information on eleven orchestra rosters for all years is given here together with a document containing the codes

Coeducation Data Set

A STATA *.dta file (upon request) contains information on more than 800 colleges and universities founded in America from the 17th century to the mid-20th century. Information is provided on the institutions from the 1924 US Biennial Survey and from the 1930 Blue Book of colleges and universities, The date of coeducation was created either from the fact that the institution began as a coeducational college or university or that it became coeducational. The definition of education that we generally employ is whether the majority of courses could be taken jointly by males and females at the institution. See C. Goldin and L. Katz, "Putting the 'Co' in Education: Timing, Reasons, and Consequences of College Coeducation in the US from 1835 to the Present."

The Economic Costs of the American Civil War

Appendix Tables to "The Economic Costs of the American Civil War: Estimates and Implications"
Goldin, C., Lewis, F. 1975. Journal of Economic History 35(2): 299-326.