UC ClioMetric History Project

UC-CHP

What role have California's public research universities played in the state's growth, health, economic mobility, and gender/ethnic equity over the past 150 years, and what is their role today?

2018 was the sesquicentennial of the University of California. To celebrate that milestone, UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education partnered with the UC Office of the President to create the UC ClioMetric History Project, a massive data repository documenting the university system’s history. On this website, you’ll find interactive displays visualizing 150 years of UC’s students, faculty, courses, and budgets, along with comparative data for private California universities and both topic briefs and academic studies analyzing higher education in California.

For academics interested in pursuing similar research, you’ll also find extensive previously-unavailable databases describing university life, including more than 100 years of faculty directories, course descriptions, and budgetary records as well as decades of student registers. Many of these records have been prepared for statistical analysis using fOCR, a new text-processing protocol described in our introductory report. UC-CHP has also digitized many decades of student transcript records and is working to make them available to outside researchers.

Want to see California universities’ expansion of engineering in the 1950s and ’60s, or the extraordinary geographic diversity of UC’s students in the first decades of the 20th century? Interested in the surprising number of female doctors being trained at UCSF in 1900, or the longitudinal wage outcomes of hundreds of thousands of UC alumni? Take a look at our newest interactive graphics below, or explore the site on your own!

Project Components

The UC ClioMetric History Project has three central components:

Data

We are collecting a comprehensive database of students, professors, courses, and budgets from UC and other California universities by digitizing directories, course catalogs, student transcripts, and other administrative documents--and we're making as much as possible publicly-available.

Visualization

Using interactive dashboards and static diagrams, we are visualizing more than 100 years of UC students: from their home towns and demographic characteristics to their socioeconomic background, schooling choices (like course and major selection), and alumni outcomes.

Analysis

Wondering how the long-run decline in state appropriations has effected UC students? Interested in UC's contributions to education and healthcare over the past century? Our data-driven analysis is meant to provide an assortment of windows into the UC's role as California's--and the country's--premier public university system.

About

Studies of higher education in the United States have long been limited by historical data availability and minimal centralized data collection, and many historical records are deprecated and nearing disposal. The University of California ClioMetric History Project (UC-CHP) extends prior analysis in two ways: (1) by digitizing thousands of volumes of historical registers and catalogs and extracting millions of individual administrative records, and (2) by coordinating with university Registrars and other offices to digitize hundreds of thousands of historical and contemporary student transcripts, constructing a database of restricted student records for academic and institutional research.

The UC-CHP database currently includes directory records for all UC, Stanford, CalTech, and Mills College students (1893-1946); UC and Stanford faculty and courses (1900-2011); detailed annual UC budgets (1911-2012); digitized student transcripts for UC San Francisco (1947-2017), UC Santa Cruz (1965-2017), and UC Berkeley (1951-2017); and digital student transcript records for UC Irvine (1965-2020), UC Davis (2080-2018), UC Riverside (1981-2018), and UC Santa Barbara (1985-2018). Post-1946 student records are not currently available to outside researchers.

The UC-CHP project is directed by Zachary Bleemer, an assistant professor of economics at Princeton University, and is currently housed at UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education (with principal investigator John Douglass) in partnership with the UC Office of the President.