Abstract: Along with boosting public and professional interests in “big data”，construction and analysis of largescale microlevel data from voluminous historical sources become available and promising.Big historical microlevel data facilitate interdisciplinary and longitudinal social scientific research，of which implications are far beyond historical but related to a better understanding of change and continuity in human behavior and society.While China has one of the world’s best and largest collections of historical documents surviving to date，practice in construction and analysis of historical microlevel data remain limited.We therefore share our experience from an ongoing research project that uses more than 150 000 individual student registration cards from two Chinese elite universities to study the evolution of social inequality in higher education between 1950 and 2000.We hope to stimulate broader academic interest，discussion，exploration，and collaboration in research using big historical microlevel data for the betterment of social sciences and humanities.

Key words:  micro-level data , quantitative methodology , historical , college student registration