How 5 College Access and Success Organizations Track and Use Student Data

Reading time: 7-8 min.

By Zenia Henderson, Director of Member & Partner Engagement

NCAN established the Success Replication Project, with the generous support of a Michael & Susan Dell Foundation grant, to help organizations ensure students they had served in high school complete postsecondary credentials. Over three years, 12 organizations set out to expand their student success services in their respective communities.

What we learned was a pretty clear formula for scaling success services, which we’ve outlined in a new four-paper series. Each paper offers a collection of case studies about several organizations that participated in the Success Replication Project. Ann Coles, senior fellow, uAspire, authored the papers.

This post is an excerpt from the second paper in the series, which outlines the ways five college access and success organizations track and use student data. The featured organizations are:

• Capital Partners for Education (Washington, D.C.)
• DC Prep, PrepNext (Washington, D.C.)
• Operation Jump Start (Long Beach, California)
• Project GRAD Houston, Aspiring Young Adults (Houston, Texas)
• Ready to Rise Tacoma, Degrees of Change (Tacoma, Washington)

NCAN would like to thank all of the individuals who took the time to share their experiences and expertise for these publications. NCAN is grateful to the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation for their support of the Success Replication Project.

Tracking and using data to inform decisions pays off for college success programs on multiple levels. Having data allows program staff to monitor the progress of individual students and tailor support to their particular needs. It enables staff to understand the effectiveness of program activities and make improvements as necessary. Most importantly, data tell staff, board members, and funders the impact of the organization’s college success services on student outcomes and the degree to which the organization is successfully fulfilling its mission.

What Organizations Measure

Organizations use short-term, intermediate, and long-term goals to assess the results of their work with students. Everyone determines their long-term success by students’ college completion, except Ready to Rise (RTR), for which completing college is an intermediate goal and employment, graduate school, and community leadership are the long-term goals. RTR, Capital Partners For Education (CPE), Operation Jump Start (OJS), and Project GRAD Houston (PGH) also consider employment a long-term goal. Year-to-year persistence in college is a common intermediate goal. In addition, CPE and RTR have intermediate goals related to behaviors they want students to demonstrate. Short-term goals focus primarily on what students need to accomplish in preparation for starting college.

Sources, Types, and Use of Data

Organizations compile data from a number of sources to inform their work with students. The table below summarizes these sources, the types of information available from each source, and how staff uses the data to ensure that the support they provide addresses students’ needs, to help them achieve their postsecondary goals.

Obtaining Student Data

The ways in which organizations obtain and manage student data vary, depending on their staff capacity and resources. They all maintain electronic files for each student served using a data management system. These files encompass three types of information: 1) records of students’ engagement in program activities; 2) student self-reported information about their experiences and achievements; and 3) information from higher education institutions documenting students’ academic progress.

Student Records

Student records encompass the results of pre- and post-assessments, information about students’ engagement in program activities, frequency of contacts, and case management notes describing the content of the interactions advisers have with students. Advisers at all the organizations input and maintain online records of their interactions with students in their caseloads, including intake information, services provided, issues discussed, referrals, and frequency and types of contact (Attachment B.) Organizations also track the progress students are making with tasks outlined by the program that they need to complete to persist in college. Information about students’ use of electronic program resources, such as opening newsletters and text messages, and attending webinars, is also kept in their files.

Self-Reported Data

Self-reported data consist of student responses to program inquiries about how they are doing with their coursework, meeting SAP (Satisfactory Academic Progress) requirements, meeting with their advisers, and other topics bearing on their progress. Students’ responses to surveys the organizations administer periodically are another source of self-reported data. Organization staff describe inherent problems with the reliability of self-reported data, especially regarding students’ academic progress. The reliability of survey data also varies depending on students’ response rate.

Third-Party Sources

National Student Clearinghouse

Organizations use the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC), which maintains data on the enrollment status of students at 3,600 colleges and universities, to track student persistence. Organizations provide the NSC with lists of their students whom they think may be in college and receive information on the enrollment status of each student by semester – where they enrolled, whether they attend full-time or part-time, and if they earned a degree. NSC data also allow programs to determine which students have transferred from one institution to another and which are no longer enrolled in college. National Student Clearinghouse data are available for an annual fee through the StudentTracker platform, which has different options for high schools and outreach organizations.

College Transcripts

Academic transcripts are the most comprehensive source of data on students’ progress toward meeting degree requirements. They provide information on credits attempted/credits earned, course grades, and GPA and, as such, are invaluable in helping advisers understand students’ academic progress, barriers, and need for support.

One way organizations secure transcripts is by executing a data-sharing agreement. Data-sharing agreements typically are negotiated between a college’s institutional research office and the organization’s staff member overseeing data management. Ready to Rise’s parent organization, Degrees of Change, executed data-sharing agreements with seven colleges and universities with which RTR has partnerships (Attachment C.) These agreements are legal documents describing the data that the institution will share with RTR and how RTR will store and protect the data from unauthorized access and use. The partner institutions provide most data to RTR electronically so that the information can be easily integrated into individual student files. Colleges can be reluctant to execute data-sharing agreements because of concerns about student confidentiality, information being misused, and the staff time involved. For these reasons, organizations need to establish a trusting relationship with a senior decision-maker as a first step. The Degrees of Change operations director, who led the work to secure data-sharing agreements, reported that it took almost a year to get the agreements drafted and signed by college officials.

Without a data-sharing agreement, organizations have two options for securing transcripts and other information. One way is to request data directly from colleges. All the organizations require students to sign a FERPA waiver when they enroll in their respective success programs, giving the colleges that students attend permission to release their college records to program staff (Attachment D.) Another option is to ask students themselves to provide unofficial copies of transcripts, as Capital Partners for Education, Project GRAD Houston, and Operation Jump Start do. OJS provides students a $500 scholarship to help with college expenses, and it also serves as an incentive for students to share their transcripts with OJS staff. This proves a successful strategy as OJS gets transcripts from most of its students. CPE and PGH do not offer such an incentive and so find it more difficult to motivate students to share their transcripts.

Read the full paper to learn how the organizations manage and analyze their data, some of the challenges they face in doing so, and much more.

Read the full "Scaling Success Services" series:

• Overview paper: Strategies for Promoting Postsecondary Success
• How 5 Organizations Increased Their Capacity to Serve More Students
• How 5 Organizations Track and Use Student Data
• How 4 Organizations Built Impactful Partnerships with Higher Ed