This post provides a new way to import and manage College Scorecard data in Stata.

Alan Riley, Stata’s VP for software development, created the following code that creates the same panel as described in my previous post.

But this one gets the job done in about 15 minutes!

Alan reached out after reading my previous post and seeing some of our Twitter conversation. He didn’t like hearing how long it took me (and others) to run this. So, Alan took it as a challenge to figure out a better way.

And that he did!

I asked if I could share this code here on my blog and he eagerly agreed. He offered one comment for users:

Just one caveat:

I feel that I just made some quick tweaks to the code, and there are probably not only more optimizations that could be found, but it could also be made more robust to potential problems with more use of Stata’s -confirm- and -assert- commands in various places to ensure everything is as expected.

Nick Cox (yes, the same Nick Cox from the Stata Forum) also reached out with some suggestions on the -destring- command I was previously using. I was destringing a lot of unnecessary items, which Alan fixed and greatly speeds up the process. Kevin Fosnacht offered all the labeling code in the previous post. And Daniel Klasik noted some quirks between Mac and PC users, where the “unitid” variable may create an error for Mac users. Thanks, guys!

And here is a .do file where I copied and pasted Alan’s original code (updated 11/14/2017): https://uwmadison.box.com/s/wo6dtfp141x103cen3uq2zr8s09av610