thestats: An Open-Data R Package for Exploring Turkish Higher Education Statistics

Abstract

There are open datasets available for official statistics, finance, education, and a variety of other domains. The open datasets are published by third-party vendors as well as official authorities. For example, The Turkish Higher Education Council maintains a web portal dedicated to higher education in Türkiye. Detailed datasets about universities, faculties, and departments can be obtained from the portal. Using the data provided by the portal, detailed analysis can be done such as the understanding impact of higher education on activities in the economy connected to movements of the students within or between cities. Especially such activity can be observed in real estate since students rent flats or rooms. Moreover, this data helps researchers analyze changes in students’ preferences in terms of higher education over time. Although this site contains a variety of important information, it does not provide any Application Programming Interfaces (API) or any other possibilities to easily download or query the data in one place. This paper introduces thestats, a user-friendly R data package designed to make higher education statistics easily accessible. Researchers can use the package to query data, which is already scraped from the portal, using the R functions provided by the package. Thanks to the package, researchers do not need to perform any further effort to delve into Turkish higher education statistics. It is sufficient for the researchers to use the package to begin exploring.