DOI: 10.3886/icpsr02398
title: Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) [United States]: Freshman Survey, 1968
title: Archival Version

description: The principal purposes of this national longitudinal study of the higher education system in the United States are to describe the characteristics of new college freshmen and to explore the effects of college on students. For each wave of this survey, students complete a questionnaire during freshman orientation or registration containing some 200 items covering information on academic skills and preparation, high school activities and experiences, educational and career plans, majors and careers, student values, financing college, and a variety of demographic questions such as sex, age, parental education and occupation, household income, race, religious preference, and state of birth. Specific questions asked of respondents in the 1968 survey included average grade in secondary school, how many colleges they had applied to for admission, accomplishments during their high school years, highest academic degree they intended to obtain, concerns about financing their education, if they were a twin, source of financing for the first year of school, academic standards and individual ranking at their high schools, size of locality in which they lived when growing up, and what they hoped to accomplish in college. Respondents were also asked to list their probable career occupation, first, second, and least appealing major field of study, and activities they engaged in during their previous year in school. Also elicited were respondents' opinions on the importance of various individuals and events in their decision to enroll in college, assessments of achieving certain goals during their college years, and general attitudes about faculty and other students.
description: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes..
description: Datasets: 
 
 DS1: Dataset
description: Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) Series
description: (1) For information on research methodology and weighting, users should consult specific editions of "The American Freshman," a report produced annually by the Graduate School of Education, University of California, Los Angeles. The 1991 edition of this report provides the following summary: "The institutions identified as part of the national population are divided into 37 stratification groups based on institutional race (predominantly white vs. predominantly black), type (two-year college, four-year college, university), control (public, private nonsectarian, Roman Catholic, and Protestant) and, for four-year colleges and universities, the selectivity level of the institution (for two-year colleges, enrollment is used in place of selectivity). Selectivity, defined as the average composite SAT score of the entering class, was made an integral part of the stratification design in 1968, and was revised and updated in 1975... Those institutions identified as being part of the Norms [national] sample are then weighted by a two-step procedure. In the first step, the counts of male and female FTFT [first-time full-time] population for each institution are divided by that institution's male and female FTFT respondent count. The resulting weights, when applied, bring the male and female respondent counts up to the corresponding counts for the population of that institution. The weighted counts for all participating institutions in each stratification cell are then summed, and divided into the national male and female FTFT counts for all institutions in that stratification cell. The resulting between-institution weights bring the male and female counts for each stratification cell up to the corresponding national counts for that stratification cell." (2) The codebook is provided by ICPSR as a Portable Document Format (PDF) file. The PDF file format was developed by Adobe Systems Incorporated and can be accessed using PDF reader software, such as the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Information on how to obtain a copy of the Acrobat Reader is provided on the ICPSR Web site.
description: All institutions of higher education with entering freshman classes listed in the fall enrollment files of the Higher Education General Information Survey/Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (HEGIS/IPEDS) data collections.
description: Approximately 15 percent of all institutions of higher education were sampled.