DOI: 10.3886/icpsr02412.v1
title: Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) [United States]: Freshman Survey, 1978
title: Version 1

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, each student completes a questionnaire during freshman orientation or registration that asks for information on academic skills and preparation, high school activities and experiences, educational and career plans, majors and careers, student values, and financing college. Other questions elicit demographic information, including sex, age, parental education and occupation, household income, race, religious preference, and state of birth. Specific questions asked of respondents in the 1978 survey included how well the students felt that their high school had prepared them in different academic areas, information regarding the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant (BEOG) and Guaranteed Student Loan (GSL) financial programs, and whether students considered themselves to be born-again Christians. Respondents were also asked to list their probable career and their assessments of achieving certain goals during their college years, as well as their predictions about what opportunities they might have in the future.
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: 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."
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.