College and Beyond II (CBII) | About the CBII Project

College and Beyond II (CBII) is a data resource for studying the impact and outcomes of higher education. It contains student record and transcript data on bachelor’s-seeking undergraduates enrolled from 2000-2021 at 19 public colleges across seven university systems. In total, CBII contains data on over 1 million students studying a wide range of majors, both in the liberal arts and sciences and in applied fields.

These student records are linkable to additional data, such as qualitative data on the content of students’ courses, survey data on graduates’ long-term life outcomes, and National Student Clearinghouse data on educational attainment. CBII is more than just a collection of data files-- it is a data infrastructure that can be leveraged to learn about many facets of students’ experiences in college. Future data enhancements will expand the range of what researchers can learn.

From 2020 to 2022, the project hosted the Liberal Arts and Life public colloquium series, which explored the values, dimensions, and outcomes of liberal arts education, and how they might best be measured. Learn more about the colloquium series here.

College and Beyond II is a product of an interdisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Michigan. It is supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation under the auspices of the Mellon Research Forum on the Value of Liberal Arts Education.

For questions about the CBII study, contact: Anna Ovchinnokova, Data Project Manager (anyao@umich.edu) and Allyson Flaster, current PI (aflaster@umich.edu).

The CBII Team

Principal Investigators:

Paul Courant

Allyson Flaster

Susan Jekielek

Maggie Levenstein

Tim McKay

Kevin Stange

Project Team:

D’Wayne Bell

Jenni Brady

W. Carson Byrd

Ben Koester

Susan Leonard

Kayla Manley

Anna Ovchinnikova

Annaliese Paulson

Alison Sweet

City University of New York

Georgia College and State University

Indiana University-Bloomington

Truman State University

University of California, Irvine

University of Houston

University of Michigan