education
To help users get the best information about past and future elections, we've worked with BallotReady to build a crosswalk between our datasets. This table includes proprietary data on the education attainment of past and current candidates from BallotReady, which we've linked to our districts and voters tables.
The Education Dataset, one of the many datasets available through BallotReady’s Data Packages, is used to explore the education history of candidates and officeholders at all levels of government across the country, from congress to local school boards. This dataset serves as an addendum to either our Candidacies or Officeholders dataset, to provide a more holistic view of the person’s background. You can easily filter this dataset to identify the type of degree the person attained, or search for specific areas of study or universities.
Whether you are looking to contact candidates or officeholders with specific backgrounds, such as teachers, engineers, or military veterans; identify people with roots in your geographic area; or decide which candidates your organization wants to support this election year, the Education Dataset helps you hone in on your specific goals.
This dataset includes one row per degree attained per person. If a candidate has multiple degrees from the same university, those will appear as separate records. These records will be accurate as of the most recent candidacy for the person.
Information on the person's education is provided as presented on their campaign website(s) or social media using the candidate's own words. Education that is not for progress towards a degree or diploma is not included.
Various ID fields can be used to track people and positions between this dataset and our Candidacies or Officeholders datasets.
- Candidate_id can be used to join this dataset to the Candidacies or Officeholders datasets, and to find all of the degrees attained by the same person
- Position_id can be used to track the candidates that have all run for the same position across multiple cycles
Field | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
position id | integer | A unique identifier for each position on a ballot in the BallotReady database. A person's education records may be repeated for each position they ran for, because our education records are associated with the candidate record |
candidate id | integer | A unique identifier for the person in the BallotReady database |
education id | integer | A unique identifier for the education record in the BallotReady database |
school | character varying | The name of the school where the person received their degree. Information on the person's education is provided as presented on their campaign website(s) or social media using the candidate's own words. Education that is not for progress towards a degree or diploma is not included. This information is only provided where BallotReady covered the person's candidacy. |
degree | character varying | The type of degree that the person received (e.g., High School Diploma, Associate's, Bachelor's, Master's, JD, etc.) |
major | character varying | The specific field of study related to the person's degree, typically used for Associate's, Bachelor's, and Master's degree types |
grad year | integer | The graduation year of the person for the degree, if provided |
education created at | timestamp | A timestamp of when the education record was created |
education updated at | timestamp | A timestamp of when the education record was most recently updated |