Roster of applicants to six major departments at UC Berkeley

Roster of applicants to six major departments at UC Berkeley

Usage

data(UCB_applicants)

Format

A data.frame object with 4236 rows, one for each of the applicants to graduate school at UC Berkeley for the Fall 1973 quarter.

• admit: Whether the applicant was admitted.

• gender: male or female

• dept: The graduate department applied to. Rather than identifying the actual departments involved, the data released by Berkeley used letter codes.

Source

The UCBApplicants summary table in the datasets R package.

Details

In 1973, officials at the University of California Berkeley noticed disturbing trends in graduate admissions rates. The data, with department names redacted, was presented and interpretted in a famous paper in Science, Bickel et al. 1975. In that paper, summary tables were presented. UCB_applicants was reverse engineered from datasets::UCBAdmissions into a data table where the unit of observation is an individual applicant. The origin of datasets::UCBAdmissions is not clear; those data are not explicitly provided in Bickel et al.

References

Bickel, P. J., Hammel, E. A., and O'Connell, J. W. (1975). Sex bias in graduate admissions: Data from Berkeley. Science, 187, 398–403.