[welliman]

Blatant plug: for large scale analysis on census and survey data I'd recommend checking out nhgis.org. It lets you download the large pieces of demographic data that you may be interested in. Data harmonized across time is also available to investigate trends.

Note: We don't have the 5-year 2017 ACS data yet (it takes about 2 weeks for us to ingest the data once it comes out).

Disclosure: I'm a developer at IPUMS.

[philrhurst]

I've used ACS and IPUMS data previously for research while at university. What are your thoughts on the proposed "differential privacy" changes [0] coming this way? Is it a "sky is falling" kind of situation?

[0] https://www.ipums.org/census-bureau-data.shtml

[welliman]

It's not really my area of expertise, but from what I understand it will severely limit what policy and demographic research can be done with the data. There's a working paper on the page you linked to which has more information: https://assets.ipums.org/_files/mpc/MPC-Working-Paper-2018-6....