California publishes education and early career dataset

California’s Cradle-to-Career Office on Tuesday released new data aimed at giving students, researchers and policymakers a better way to study how the state’s education systems shape its workforce across different communities and demographics.

The “Student Pathways” dataset, downloadable files in Excel and CSV formats, allows the public to see how students pursuing varying education pathways, such as four-year universities, trade schools, community college and higher education programs — and how those pathways influence which fields students enter, job security and salary.

The release of the dataset is part of the initiative’s “Query Builder” project, which aims to let researchers dig into the numbers and build tools based on existing education and workforce data, said Mary Ann Bates, executive director of the Cradle to Career data system.

“Right now on the dashboard, you could click download 9,000 times to get the 9,000 cuts of data that are powering those dashboard visualizations,” Bates said. “But what we heard from researchers as soon as we launched the dashboard is that they’d really love to have all of that information in one place in a few neat and tidy CSV files so they can use that information to do their own statistical analysis with it.”

Launched in April, the Student Pathways dashboard shows education and job trends, but until now, the underlying data wasn’t available for deeper analysis. By releasing the raw datasets, Bates said, she hopes researchers and policymakers can highlight trends, such as which demographic groups are doing well in school and early career.

Bates said her office began building Query Builder in response to feedback during a meeting last May, when users requested more transparency and tools to ask their own questions of the data.

“This is a resource that was a direct result of user feedback,” she said of Query Builder.

Bates said privacy and security are a central part to the new release, and that the data system links existing records but does not collect new information directly from students or families.

“We also wanted to do another round of reviewing all of the data privacy controls that we have in place to make sure that all of that was structured in a way such that when we put this information on our website, we’re confident that we’re protecting the privacy of California students,” Bates said.

Over the next few months, Bates said, the Cradle-to-Career Office will launch a lesson plan challenge, in which educators can share academic lessons they’ve created using the datasets, and developing a secure data enclave, similar to Federal Statistical Research Data Centers, a controlled environment where researchers can conduct analysis and extract insights on privacy-protected data.

“Think of it as a way to enable privacy protected research using the underlying data in collaboration with our data providers, our data partners who continue to steward the data that cradle to career links on behalf of the state,” she said.