NCAN’s Benchmarking Project Returns Thanks to These Members

The Benchmarking Project is a collaborative effort between NCAN and its members to demonstrate the field’s impact on students’ postsecondary outcomes. Five previous rounds of the project demonstrate that participating NCAN members largely closed postsecondary enrollment gaps for the students they served and made progress on, but did not close, completion gaps.

This spring, Benchmarking will return for its sixth iteration thanks to more than 40 members who agreed to participate and made the time to share their student-level data even amidst a pandemic that has made serving students all the more difficult.

This round of the Benchmarking Project asked NCAN members to submit data on students from the high school classes of 2014, 2019, and/or 2020. These last two years are especially important because they will examine students’ enrollment outcomes pre- and post-COVID. Programs run their data through the National Student Clearinghouse’s StudentTracker service, and students are then matched against the NSC’s extensive national database.

The first analysis from this round of the Benchmarking Project is slated for release in mid-May and will focus specifically on the question of how well being served by an NCAN member inoculated students from postsecondary enrollment declines observed nationally.

Last month, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center estimated a 22% decline in postsecondary enrollment for the high school class of 2020.

Subsequent releases from this round of Benchmarking will show comparison points on enrollment, persistence, and completion for NCAN members. These will be disaggregated by race, ethnicity, and gender.

The Benchmarking Project remains a rich source of data for NCAN and the field. Interested in how its data can help your program? Looking for a comparison point for your program? Please contact Bill DeBaun at debaunb@ncan.org.

NCAN is immensely grateful to the following members who are making round 6 of the Benchmarking Project possible:

• 10,000 Degrees
• Achieve Atlanta
• Birmingham Promise
• Bottom Line
• Breakthrough Austin
• Breakthrough Collaborative
• Bridgeport Public Education Fund
• Bridges to a Brighter Future
• Capital Partners for Education
• Chicago Scholars Foundation
• CitySquash
• College Beyond
• College Bound
• College Forward
• College Horizons
• College Now Greater Cleveland
• College Success Arizona
• College Success Foundation (DC & WA)
• College Track
• College Visions
• Crosby Scholar Community Partnership
• Denver Scholarship Foundation
• The Emily Krzyzewski Center
• First Generation College Bound
• Fulfillment Fund
• Goddard Riverside Community Center
• Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans
• I Know I Can
• Jack Kent Cooke Foundation
• Marcus Foster Education Institute
• Oakland Promise
• Ontario-Montclair Schools Foundation
• Partnership for the Future
• Pedrozzi Scholarship Foundation
• Philadelphia Futures
• Project GRAD Knoxville
• Public Education Foundation
• Richmond Promise
• Robert and Janice McNair Educational Foundation
• Talent Search Monroe County Schools
• Uplift Education
• Woodward Hines Education Foundation