The Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study (BPS) is composed of the students who participated in the 1995–96 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS:96) who enrolled in postsecondary education for the first time in 1995–96. The National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS) is a comprehensive nationwide study conducted by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to determine how students and their families pay for postsecondary education.¹ It also describes demographic and other characteristics of students enrolled. The study is based on a nationally representative sample of all students in postsecondary education institutions, including undergraduate, graduate, and first-professional students. For NPSAS:96, information was obtained from more than 830 postsecondary institutions on approximately 44,500 undergraduate, 8,700 graduate, and 2,500 first-professional students. They represented about 16.7 million undergraduates, 2.4 million graduate students, and 300,000 first-professional students who were enrolled at some time between July 1, 1995 and June 30, 1996.

The BPS sample consists of approximately 12,000 students identified in NPSAS:96 who were beginning postsecondary education for the first time. The first follow-up of the BPS cohort (BPS:96/98) occurred in the spring and summer of 1998, approximately 3 years after they first enrolled. Approximately 10,300 of the students who first began in 1995–96 were located and interviewed in the first follow-up. The weighted effective response rate for potential members of the BPS cohort in the NPSAS:96 base year was 77.6 percent. The weighted effective response rate in the 1998 follow-up of the NPSAS:96 respondents was 85.9 percent. The overall weighted response rate (including those who were nonrespondents in NPSAS:96) for the BPS:96/98 first follow-up was 79.8 percent.²

The BPS:96/98 Data Analysis System includes a sample weight for longitudinal analysis of the data through 1998 (B98AWT). All the estimates in this report are based on this weight.