Projects

College and Beyond II

College and Beyond II (CBII) is a data resource for studying the impact and outcomes of higher education. It contains student record and transcript data on bachelor’s-seeking undergraduates enrolled from 2000-2021 at 19 public colleges across seven university systems. In total, CBII contains data on over 1 million students studying a wide range of majors, both in the liberal arts and sciences and in applied fields.

These student records are linkable to additional data, such as qualitative data on the content of students’ courses, survey data on graduates’ long-term life outcomes, and National Student Clearinghouse data on educational attainment. CBII is more than just a collection of data files– it is a data infrastructure that can be leveraged to learn about many facets of students’ experiences in college. Future data enhancements will expand the range of what researchers can learn.

From 2020 to 2022, the project hosted the Liberal Arts and Life public colloquium series, which explored the values, dimensions, and outcomes of liberal arts education, and how they might best be measured. Learn more about the colloquium series here.

College and Beyond II is a product of an interdisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Michigan. It is supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation under the auspices of the Mellon Research Forum on the Value of Liberal Arts Education.

The Mellon Foundation

Allyson Flaster, Paul N Courant, Maggie Levenstein, Kevin Michael Stange