The first thing you would do is inspect the data. Does the variable EDUC99 always take on values that appear on this scale, or are there other values possible?
Assuming that the value always appears on this scale, the next thing you would do is decide how many years of education you would like to assign for each of the categories. There are no guidelines available from a program ... it's your decision.
Once those decisions are in place, you could write a set of IF/THEN statements within a DATA step. For example:
data want;
set have;
if EDUC99=1 then years_of_education=0;
else if EDUC99=8 then years_of_education=11;
else if EDUC99=9 then years_of_education=12;
else ...
run;
I'm assuming that EDUC99 is numeric, because it is connected to a numeric format (EDUC99_f). But if it turns out to be character, slight changes might be needed.
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