UCB_applicants {LSTbook}

Roster of applicants to six major departments at UC Berkeley

Description

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.

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.

Source

The UCBApplicants summary table in the datasets R package.

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.