Track student postsecondary outcomes

CONTRIBUTED BY: NATIONAL COLLEGE ATTAINMENT NETWORK (NCAN)

Do district and school personnel really know where their students go after high school graduation? Unfortunately, the answer too often is “no” or “not really.”

Actual data about students’ postsecondary enrollment, persistence, and completion outcomes are available via the National Student Clearinghouse’s StudentTracker service. School districts, high schools, and community-based education organizations are all eligible to sign up for an annual StudentTracker subscription. After submitting lists of students (either high school graduates or service recipients), subscribers can get back information on students’ enrollments, including institutions, credits accumulated, and degrees earned, among other data.

The National Student Clearinghouse is a nonprofit repository of postsecondary data covering 97% of students in public and private institutions. More than 3,600 colleges and universities send data to the NSC, and nearly 14,000 high schools subscribe to the StudentTracker service.

A handful of states provide information about in-state enrollments, but unfortunately the nature of these statewide longitudinal data systems varies widely between states.

To better understand postsecondary outcomes and fold those insights back into postsecondary advising, states, districts, schools, and educational organizations serving students should subscribe to this service or potentially take advantage of in-state options.

How does the strategy create more equitable access and opportunities?

The thoughtful use of data has often shone a light on inequitable conditions and created urgency for change. Consider the upward trend in high school graduation rates that resulted in standardizing the reporting of that metric. Increasing access to student-level data on postsecondary outcomes functions similarly.

Too often, states, districts, schools, and practitioners are functioning on assumptions about what happens to students after they graduate from high school. Students’ trajectories can, and do, change following high school graduation. That is especially true when we consider estimates of “summer melt” wherein 10 to 40% of students who have been accepted to and intend to matriculate to an institution never arrive on campus. Further, low-income, first-generation, and students of color are more likely to be impacted by summer melt.

Accessing student-level postsecondary outcomes data, through the StudentTracker service or otherwise, provides concrete insights that can be folded back into postsecondary advising. Key questions like “Where do my students go?”, “How do they do when they get there?”, “Which college-intending students actually matriculate and which melt?” are all actionable. Identifying the gaps illuminated by the data is the first step to closing them in future classes.

What outcomes or benefits are associated with the strategy?

• Better understanding of students’ actual postsecondary outcomes, including longitudinal trend data.

• Enhanced ability to incorporate postsecondary fit and match into advising strategies.

• Increased opportunity for understanding matriculation patterns and measuring summer melt.

What are the budget implications for implementing the strategy?

The StudentTracker service is relatively affordable. Subscriptions currently cost $595 per high school per year. Educational organizations can procure a subscription based on the number of records requested annually, and those subscriptions start at $595 for up to 5,000 students and cap at $2,500 for up to 20,000 students.

The subscription returns a large report of charts and graphs based on submitted data. However, some districts may desire additional analysis of the detailed data sent back to them. This may require staff time (e.g., from district-level data and reporting personnel) or the enlistment of an outside contractor (estimated at $1,500 annually).

Districts, schools, and programs operating within states with more advanced longitudinal data systems may be able to manage without a StudentTracker subscription but will likely opt for one in the long run to gain access to data on out-of-state enrollments.