The Joint Academic Coding System (JACS) system was used by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) and the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) in the United Kingdom to classify academic subjects.
It was replaced by the Higher Education Classification of Subjects (HECoS) and the Common Aggregation Hierarchy (CAH) for the 2019/20 academic year.
In 1996 a joint project was launched to bring these two systems together to create a unified structure.
The project team became known as JACS since this was an acronym of their names (Jonathan Waller and Andy Youell from HESA, Clive Sillence and Sara Goodwins from UCAS).
An update exercise took place in 2005 and JACS 2 was introduced for the academic year 2007/08.