Tracking the 2020 cohort from high-school graduation through university to teacher career entry in Kazakhstan

We present a linked administrative dataset of 69,754 high school graduates from Kazakhstan’s 2020 cohort who enrolled in higher education institutions in the same year. The dataset integrates five national administrative sources: the high school graduation registry, school-level institutional characteristics, the Unified National Test (UNT) examination database, the national university enrollment registry, and the teacher workforce registry. Of the 69,754 graduates, 2,960 (4.2 percent) entered the teaching profession by 2024. For each graduate the dataset records student demographics, socioeconomic background, school type and infrastructure, UNT examination scores, university and programme characteristics, and, for those who became teachers, their employing school, subject taught, and professional attributes. The dataset enables research on the determinants of teacher supply, the sorting of graduates into teaching, and the role of school and university characteristics in shaping career entry into education.