In the 2008 Wave 1 Panel, a small number of cases (58) were incorrectly coded “out of universe" (-1) on the variable RCOLLVOC. This involves people with an associate’s or higher degree and no information on whether they had a vocational degree. These cases should have received imputed values for RCOLLVOC but did not. The problem has been corrected for the data from Wave 2 onward.

Each of these cases had a value of 'Yes' for EVOCAT, meaning that each reported attending a vocational school. Had these cases been correctly routed through the imputation matrix for RCOLLVOC, they would have drawn from a donor pool with similar values on EVOCAT (=1) and EEDUCATE (>= 43). Of these similar cases, 83 percent had a value of 10 on RCOLLVOC (vocational degree, more than an associates degree), while the remaining 17 percent had values of 5 (no vocational degree, associates degree or higher).

Data users interested in assigning RCOLLVOC values to these 58 problematic cases could either give each a value of 10 (since the majority of potential donor cases had values of 10), or users could randomly assign 48 cases (83 percent) a value of 10 and 10 cases (17 percent) a value of 5.

Below are the distributions within each degree category.

Associate’s Degree – 26 cases
Bachelor’s Degree – 22 cases
Master’s Degree – 9 cases
Professional Degree – 1 case