ACCESS Higher Education Admission Rules Data Set 

The ACCESS dataset is a comprehensive survey of all laws regulating university admission and admission requirements at German universities between the winter semester of 1973/74 and the winter semester of 2023/24. In total, 2,222 documents (Staatsverträge, Hochschulgesetze, Hochschulzulassungsgesetze, Verordnungen) were coded. Amendment regulations were included only if they contained relevant changes for the dataset. The cutoff date for including the most current legal texts in the coding was October 31, 2023. The dataset consists of nearly 9,000 coded selection procedures, which together represent 39,496 semester*year observations of selection procedures that were legally standardized in a particular federal state or at a specific university, in certain degree programs. The characteristics of selection procedures recorded in the admission process include criteria and available study places in both the preliminary and main selection processes, secondary criteria and bonuses in the main procedure, as well as procedural options in university selection procedures (AdH) and in the central eligibility quota (ZEQ). Admission barriers were coded for both universities and universities of applied sciences. Excluded were programs at art, music, and sports universities, as well as artistic and sports science programs at other universities that rely on non-standardized entrance exams for student selection. Also excluded were teacher training programs listed in the admission regulations without specific subject-based details. The dataset is especially of interest to higher education researchers who, like us, investigate admission procedures and their changes or wish to use them as contextual features for other datasets.