Association of American Universities Data Exchange (AAUDE)
Undergraduate Time to Degree by CIP of Major
Data Exchange for 2009-10 (pertaining to degrees awarded during 2008-09)
There are no changes to the instructions for this exchange item during the 2009-10 academic year.
1_Instructions_and_Specifications -- survey population, data element definitions and formats, and due date.
2_Data_Collection_Template -- including two examples of data submissions
As of October 2, the following institutions submitted data for last year's collection cycle (pertaining to degrees awarded during 2007-08): Cornell, Illinois, Iowa State, Kansas, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Penn State, Pittsburgh, Purdue, Texas, Texas A&M, UC-Santa Barbara, and Wisconsin.
AAU Institutional Data Committee (IDC) Recommendation, April 2007: AAU institutions should collect time-to-degree data for the campus overall, and by discipline. Initially, data will be collected on a subset of the largest degree-producing majors for AAU institutions, to be determined by an analysis of AAU university degree production. The data will be aggregated by institution and discipline, using CIP codes to facilitate comparisons across universities. Time to degree will be calculated with a backward-looking procedure by establishing cohorts of all degree recipients from July 1 through June 30 of a given academic year and then determining when each student in the cohort first started at the institution. AAUDE has developed a methodology for this calculation and will coordinate the time-to-degree data collection and summary reports. The summary reports will provide information by discipline (e.g., biology, physical sciences, business, engineering, arts and humanities, social science) and by individual majors.
This survey will be conducted annually and will include information only for full-time, degree-seeking students who entered as first-time freshmen at the institution; the data will not include transfer students.
A brief survey of the AAU institutions that collect time-to-degree data found that institutions use a number of ways of measuring time-to-degree, including the number of registered terms, the number of academic years enrolled, the number of credits awarded, and the number of elapsed calendar months and years. AAUDE believes it can develop a method to allow institutions to provide data in several different ways and develop crosswalks between them to provide comparable information overall.
Once the data collection procedure described above has been used for a few years, AAU should consider whether to refine the time-to-degree data to employ unit record data collection, which would support expanded analyses by providing, for example, frequency distributions as well as measures of central tendency. If the judgment is that collecting unit record data meets a cost/benefit test of providing sufficiently more useful information, the AAU will carefully evaluate the privacy and security aspects of such a unit-record collection procedure before implementing it.