The Policy Tracking Cohort (PTC) is a longitudinal data set designed to allow
researchers to conduct advanced statistical analyses on a series of undergraduate cohorts. It is limited to degree-seeking, first-time freshman undergraduate CUNY students.
It comprises a series of Stata-formatted data sets divided into roughly two-year chunks in order to keep the file size to a reasonable limit. It is typically shared in text file format. The first cohort consists of those who entered in fall 1999. The
Current Extract page has information on the most recent cohort and year of data available at this time.
The PTC has
1 record per student and has up to 10 years of data on a student (depending on current data availability). Many of the longitudinal variables are measured at the
semester level, with financial aid variables measured at the fiscal year level.
Content areas of the PTC include:
Supplements to the PTC include:
- National Student Clearinghouse Data
- Wage Record Data (requires a special and specific data sharing agreement and training)
Topics pertinent to the PTC data include:
- Show versus Perf Data
- Semester versus Fiscal Year (FY)
- Absolute versus Relative Semester