A Linked Dataset for Analyzing Educational Trajectories from Secondary School to Higher Education in Colombia

This dataset provides a curated, student-level linkage of Colombia's two national standardized examinations: SABER 11 (end of secondary education) and SABER PRO (end of undergraduate studies), both administered by ICFES with census coverage. It contains 332,990 linked student records and 32 variables covering demographics, high school of origin, SABER 11 baseline scores (five subjects, 0–100; global 0–500), higher-education context (361 institutions and 4,249 SNIES programs, with official codes as authoritative keys), and SABER PRO outcome scores (five generic modules, 0–300). SABER 11 cohorts span 2014–2021 and SABER PRO cohorts 2016–2023, with a median interval of 6 years between examinations. The release follows a documented curation pipeline (identifier removal, derived top-coded ages, recoding of non-scored essays, label harmonization) and is accompanied by a bilingual Spanish/English machine-readable codebook. The dataset supports research on academic value added, institutional effectiveness, equity, and educational data mining, and has already underpinned peer-reviewed recommender systems (Applied Sciences 2024, 14, 8311; Electronics 2025, 14, 4121). Derived from ICFES open microdata; distributed under CC BY 4.0 with attribution to ICFES.