Overview
midfielddata is an R data package that provides anonymized student-level records for 98,000 undergraduates at three US institutions from 1988 through 2018, collected in four data tables keyed by student ID:
- student all students, their demographics, transfer status, institution, etc.
- course all students, every course, course name, number, credit hours, grades, etc.
- term all students, every term, program, standing, GPA, etc.
- degree all graduating students, their degree(s), program(s), term
The data in midfielddata are a proportionate stratified sample of the MIDFIELD database (Ohland and Long 2016), but are not suitable for drawing inferences about program attributes or student experiences—midfielddata are for practice, not research.
Suggested packages.
- midfieldr for working with MIDFIELD data (Layton et al. 2026)
- data.table for manipulating data (Barrett et al. 2026)
Installation
The installed size of midfielddata is about 24 Mb, so installation will take longer than that of a conventional CRAN package. Install from the MIDFIELDR drat repository with:
install.packages("midfielddata",
repos = "https://MIDFIELDR.github.io/drat/",
type = "source"
)Usage
Data tables can be loaded individually or collectively as needed.
library(midfielddata)
# Load one table as needed
data(student)
# Or load multiple tables
data(course, term, degree)Tutorials:
Acknowledgments
The development of midfieldr and midfielddata was supported by the US National Science Foundation through grant numbers 1545667 and 2142087.