Disclaimer about the Data Tool

Varying Degrees is conducted with the hope to build a longitudinal data set of public opinion data about education after high school. However, we have made some changes throughout the last seven years to improve the survey instrument and modality of data collection, which may affect the ability to analyze the data long term. One of the major changes was the change in the survey mode from mostly phone to mostly online in 2019. Following the transition to mostly online, we decided to drop the neutral response options (for example: neither agree nor disagree) to improve response quality. Therefore, these changes may explain some of the data shifts from 2017 and 2018 collection years compared to 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 collection years.