Postsecondary Data
Wave III Education Data Users’ Guides

As many Add Health students were attending colleges or universities at the time of the Wave III Survey, it is useful for analysts to have some information about the postsecondary institutions they attended. AHAA collected IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) codes, which identify every postsecondary institution in the United States, for students who were currently enrolled in postsecondary education at the time of their Wave III interview. Indicators were constructed from institutional characteristics from the IPEDS data in 2001-2002 for those institutions attended by Add Health respondents to characterize various aspects of students’ postsecondary institutions, including the characteristics of institutions themselves (such as tuition costs), as well as aggregate measures of the student body (such as the racial/ethnic composition). Additionally, the AHAA team constructed a variable to measure the selectivity of the institutions that respondents attend based on information on the median SAT scores of entering students. Codes available from IPEDS also enable linking with several secondary data sources, including Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges, U.S. News and World Report, and American Survey of Colleges.

Users’ Guides and Associated Data Files

Postsecondary Contextual Component Codebook, 2008
edupost: This data file contains measures of the characteristics of postsecondary institutions attended by Add Health students.