College Course Map: Background

The College Course Map (CCM) is a product of the US Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) that is featured prominently in their longitudinal surveys of postsecondary students. The CCM was originally developed in 1990, based on extensive conversations with experts drawn from disciplines across the postsecondary curriculum and was substantially revised in 2010 (Adelman, 1990; 2004; Bryan & Simone, 2012). Transcripts are collected by NCES for the students included in their longitudinal surveys. But, because raw administrative transcripts are unwieldy to work with, these courses are then annotated and standardized by human coders using the CCM typology (Bryan & Simone, 2012). The CCM maps each course into a six-digit code where the first two digits define a course's broad cluster (e.g. 45 - social sciences), the third and fourth digits define a course's subcategory (e.g. 45.06 - economics), and the fifth and sixth digits define a course's specific subject code (e.g. 45.0603 econometrics and quantitative economics). Across the NCES datasets we work with, there are 48 unique two-digit codes, 403 unique four-digit codes, and 2,041 unique six-digit codes.

At the four-digit level, the CCM scheme is quite similar to the widely used Classification of Instructional Program (CIP) taxonomy used to characterize college majors and programs, although the six-digit level denotes specific courses rather than majors or programs. The CCM does not explicitly embed the level of courses (e.g. introductory, lower-division, upper-division) in the numbering system, though some specific introductory courses are separately identified (for instance, introductory courses to a discipline are typically coded under a general category such as "Writing, General"). The table below lists the top 30 CCM codes with the largest enrollments across all the PETS studies we analyzed. The 80 most common course codes represent 50% of enrollment.

Thirty College Course Map Codes with Largest Enrollments

Notes: Table reports the 30 CCM codes that appear the most frequently in the four combined PETS samples used in the study. Numbers are rounded to the nearest ten to preserve confidentiality of NCES restricted data.

Source: Authors' calculations from U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, High School and Beyond Longitudinal Study of 2009 Seniors, "Postsecondary Education Transcript Study", 04/09 Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study, "Postsecondary Education Transcript Study", 12/17 Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study, "Postsecondary Education Transcript Study", and 2008/09 Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study, "Postsecondary Education Transcript Study."