NCAN members hopefully know by now about the importance of the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) and its StudentTracker service.
If you don’t, and as a refresher, the NSC is a nonprofit that holds data on about 98% of the postsecondary enrollments in the United States in a given year. Through their StudentTracker service, colleges, high schools, and educational organizations
can access information on the postsecondary enrollments, transfers, and completions of the students they serve.
Rather than individually following up with students about enrollments or trying to get information directly from registrars, the StudentTracker allows organizations to upload a large batch of student data have them matched against the NSC's data.
The service is affordable, too. At the time of this writing, an annual subscription costs school districts $425 per high school, which includes reports being delivered thrice annually. Outreach organizations can select the pricing tier that works best
for them according to their size, but the lowest is $425, which covers retrieving data on up to 5,000 students annually.
Even better news: a forthcoming revamped StudentTracker 3.0 holds the promise of improving on the current platform in a number of ways, including,
according to the website:
It will be easier to submit data to StudentTracker.
The system will be more efficient.
A new set of robust standardized reports will be available to all StudentTracker subscribers.
The platform will offer a simpler, more streamlined, interactive user experience.
It will include expanded data sets to enrich reports, as they become available.
This is all so great because despite the obvious utility and timesaving of getting students’ postsecondary outcome data all returned at once, the current StudentTracker isn’t without its foibles. For example, although the aggregated data come back in
a PowerPoint-style slide deck for StudentTracker for High School subscribers, Outreach subscribers don’t currently get that kind of output. In both cases, the biggest obstacle tends to be that the “detail file” that has data at the student-by-enrollment
level can be difficult to work with (mostly because of the file structure and the level of detail).
No arrival date yet for StudentTracker 3.0, but NCAN will keep you posted so you, too, can celebrate its launch.
Until that time comes, here are some tips on making the most of the current generation of StudentTracker. Grizzled StudentTracker veterans will know these by heart, but for the rest of us, some things to keep in mind.
The Glass Is Half Full (or 70%, or 80%, etc.)
NCAN members’ chief complaint about StudentTracker seems to be that it’s somewhat fallible. The service works to match a student based on a combination of first name, middle initial or name, last name, and date of birth, as well as optionally by Social
Security number if provided (many programs don’t collect that information).
For all kinds of reasons discussed below, sometimes submitted students don’t match with the NSC’s data. This is surely frustrating because it means a program isn’t getting “credit” for those students’ outcomes, and more importantly programs just want
to know what happens to those they serve.
Rather than focus on what isn’t getting returned, however, it’s helpful to keep in mind what is. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say 80% of students match and their data get returned. That leaves 20% of students to track down, either to confirm
they didn’t enroll and find out why or to confirm that they did enroll and correct their record in the program’s data system.
Tracking down individual students like this is time-consuming and burdensome for staff. Without the StudentTracker, staff would be engaging in that process with 100% of their students instead of 20% in this fictional example. As programs get larger, surely
that 20% is untenable, but at the very least StudentTracker offers a good start.
Yes, You Can Improve Your Match Rate
One of the questions NCAN fields most often related to StudentTracker is about improving the match rate described above. Yes, it is possible to improve it. NCAN wrote a whole blog post about it! Here are some of the do’s and don’ts referenced there:
DO NOT put nicknames in the first name field! Especially DO NOT put something like: William “Bill” or Peter “Pete” or Elizabeth “Liz.”
DO put something like: “Peter” or “Pete” (with no quotations). The NSC’s algorithm will search for different common permutations of a name to try to make a match.
DO NOT use periods, punctuation, or numbers as part of a name.
DO use Sr or Jr (no periods) and Roman numerals such as I, II, etc. in the suffix fields.
DO NOT include suffixes in the last name field (e.g., Bill P. Andrews, Jr. should not have “Andrews, Jr.” in the last name field). Put suffixes like this in the name suffix column separate from the last name.
DO NOT put full middle names. The first letter of the middle name is sufficient.
DO put middle initials whenever possible. This may seem counterintuitive, but the first initial can help to break ties among students with otherwise identical names (Joe A. Smith vs. Joe R. Smith). Spelling out the full middle name just provides
one more place where data could mismatch. For example, if you know that Rebecca’s middle name is pronounced phonetically “Kelly,” it might be spelled Kelli, Kellie, Kelley, or Kelly, and it might even be that you misheard it and it is actually
Kelsey. Putting any one of these spelled out names when the name is actually spelled a different way might cause a mismatch whereas just putting a “K” for the middle initial will help to preserve a match.
The rest of the article is worth checking out, if I do say so myself.
Try Different Combinations of Students’ Names
Earlier this year, I had the chance to listen in on a group of StudentTracker power users as they talked about their experiences with the platform and, in doing so, wound up trading tips and tricks.
For organizations using the StudentTracker for Outreach or StudentTracker for Other Educational Organizations versions of the platform, one strategy that came up to improve match rates was to submit a “graduate file” (the NSC lingo for the list of students
you’re trying to match) with multiple versions of the same student’s name and/or birthdate.
Essentially the idea is to vary the way first and last names are spelled (for example if a student has multiple last names), whether middle initial is or isn’t included, etc., and then see which version of the student’s name and birthdate returns enrollment
data. Moving forward, programs can use the version of the name that matched in their main graduate file.
This is a very clever, but time consuming, strategy. Hopefully in the future NCAN can release another blog post laying out the process step by step.
Make Better Use of the Requester Return Field
The “Requester Return Field” is probably one of the most underutilized NSC StudentTracker features. Essentially it’s a free text field that stays attached to a student’s record (“row”) even after submitting to NSC. So essentially, put anything you want
to associate with a student in the field, then submit. When you get the data back, whatever you submitted will still be there.
Many programs will put a unique ID for a student into the field so that it can match back to their usual student information system or platform. But think about all the variables that could be attached to a student record using the requester return field
like academic, demographic, or course-taking characteristics, for example. Connecting those variables and the outcomes from the NSC detail file allows for disaggregation and even inferential statistics to see how those characteristics impacted students’
outcomes.
To save space, don’t spell out the full values of the variables in the field. Instead use a crosswalk and separate variables with a period.
If you feel like I’m speaking in a foreign language, that’s OK. This isn’t the first time we’ll touch on this idea. Consider a high school that wants to include, for whatever reason, each student’s 12th grade math teacher in the requester return
field and the extracurricular activity the student engaged with the most. These are hypothetical variables, of course, there are probably tons of program-specific ones to put in their place.
An example crosswalk might look like: “Ms. Thomas” = 1, “Mr. Green” = 2, “Mr. Davis” = 3. “Soccer” = A, “Model UN” = B, “Environmental Club” = C.
There are only a finite number of characters in the requester return field, so a student who had Mr. Green and participated in Model UN would be coded as “2.B” in the requester return field, which saves a ton of space. Then when the data come back, use
the crosswalk and the position of the values to then “unzip” the data.
This is just one way to squeeze a little more value out of StudentTracker submissions.
When the Data Come Back; Understand Use Cases
One of the big disconnects we’ve seen between districts, schools, and organizations and their NSC data is not really knowing what to do with it from there. In some cases that’s a question about how to break the file down and analyze it. In other cases
it’s literally not knowing which questions to ask of these data.
Use the short list below as a starting point for brainstorming questions you should be asking from your data. We'll dive into these more in a future blog post.
How long does it take my students to complete a degree?
Which kinds of schools are my students attending?
What are my students’ completion rates by starting institution?
What is my students’ time to degree by starting institution?
To or from which community colleges do they most often transfer? To where do they transfer?
Do they stop out? At which point? For how long?
Are there outcome disparities by race/ethnicity or gender?
To reiterate, the StudentTracker platform is an invaluable tool for the college access and success field, and NCAN strongly encourages its use. We suggest NCAN members use this platform and ensure the districts and schools they work with also sign up
for the StudentTracker for High School service.
This post has laid out a few tips and tricks, and NCAN intends for it to be the first in a series of posts in this vein. To learn more about the StudentTracker, visit the Clearinghouse Academy for videos, webinars, and other self-guided learning opportunities.
In the meantime, if you have questions or comments or want to share your own tips or tricks (we’d welcome a guest post), I encourage you to contact me at debaunb@ncan.org.
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