Continuous variable for education?

Is there a continuous variable for education (for example, years of education)? If not, has anyone tried creating a spline variable based on EDUC using Stata? Thanks!!

Hello Haiyue,

There is no continuous education variable in IPUMS USA, but creating one based on EDUC is straightforward. For example:

Kindergarten → 1

1st grade → 2

2nd grade → 3

etc.

For the higher categories, you’ll need to make a decision on how to code them. For example, the category “1 or more years of college” could reasonably be recoded as 14 (1 more than 12th grade), or as 15 (2 more than twelfth grade).

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