Outside of the National Student Clearinghouse itself, you’d be hard-pressed to find an organization higher on the list of boosters of the StudentTracker service than NCAN. For the unfamiliar, StudentTracker is a subscription service that allows high schools and education nonprofits to get real postsecondary outcomes data about the students they serve.
GuidEd Insight, a spinoff data visualization and analysis platform related to NCAN member Degrees of Change, also deserves to be
quite high on that list of boosters.
GuidEd Insight describes itself as an “all-in-one data insights tool that gives educators, advisors, and administrators the insight they need to improve postsecondary outcomes for every student.” The platform takes the detail file received by StudentTracker subscribers and converts it into a variety of dashboards that answer different key questions.
That conversion is important because although the StudentTracker data is valuable (consider the effort and difficulty that would be involved in tracking down students' postsecondary outcomes individually), it is not always intuitive to work with. Many
NCAN member subscribers have described and lamented over the years the steep learning curve of working with the detail file data. (Fortunately, the NSC will launch a more user-friendly StudentTracker 3.0 next year, which will hopefully alleviate many of these issues!)
GuidEd Insight aims to address those difficulties and generate additional, well, insights from the StudentTracker’s postsecondary outcomes data that can transform college advising and give a better understanding of students' postsecondary pathways.
Now a sidebar that’s part history lesson and part disclosure.
GuidEd Insight is the successor to the Foyost (Follow Your Students) platform, also developed by Degrees of Change. Foyost developed out of an NSC data visualizer whose roots go all the way back to the Common Measures Learning Community (CMLC), a project
NCAN led from 2013 to 2016. The 20 member programs in CMLC realized that working with the NSC data was important but had usability hurdles to overcome. Specifically, the "long" student by enrollment format shape of the data was tricky for programs
to overcome (with or without data analysts); these programs agreed that a "wide" format with one student per row would be much easier to work with.
Degrees of Change’s executive director Dr. Tim Herron used skills garnered from his Ph.D. program to write code that would transform the detail file into just such a format. Early iterations of the "NSC data visualizer," and later Foyost, were supported
by NCAN member programs who helped to refine the user experience and the programs’ functionality.
The disclosure comes in because I led the CMLC work and have personally and professionally been both closely involved with and a big supporter of the NSC data visualizer since its inception. I continue to believe in the transformational power of using
postsecondary outcomes data, and I think these platforms, and their most recent and mature iteration, GuidEd Insight, have a lot of value.
Sidebar over, and we fast forward to the present. What does GuidEd Insight actually do? Here are some of the main features and functions (this is definitely non-exhaustive):
Gauge Student Success: GuidEd Insight provides a high-level overall view of students' outcomes in three main categories: college enrollment, persistence, and completion. The platform is built-in with over 40 standardized, research-based
metrics that capture a wide variety of program outcomes.
Compare Outcomes: This platform allows users to quickly compare postsecondary outcomes for high schools side by side and understand equity gaps within and across schools and/or programs
See Program Impact: GuidEd Insight assists schools and organizations in comparing up to 10 different programs’ outcomes side-by-side
Track Students Journeys: The platform converts NSC data into a dashboard in a one-row-per-student format that is color-coded by student outcomes and allows for deep dives into any particular student’s postsecondary pathway.
Assess College Selection: Lastly, GuidED Insight displays student outcomes by postsecondary institution using a school or organization’s own NSC data. It can complement other fit and match tools by providing insights around which
groups of a subscriber’s students historically have been best supported at which colleges to help aid advisers in college selection decisions.
All of these dashboards are filterable by a wide variety of school, student, and program variables.
Cost is obviously important to many districts, schools, and nonprofits. The current annual pricing model is $0.99 per student enrolled with the following minimums:
This is more expensive than a StudentTracker subscription (currently $595 per high school per year or $595 for an outreach organization requesting up to 5,000 records annually), but that may not be the right way of thinking about the price.
Especially in school districts, a major difficulty in working with the NSC data is having an analyst to convert the data into a usable format, make sense of it, and report clearly about it. In some places, the learning curve is steep for existing analysts;
in others, workforce conditions may not make such an analyst available at all. If GuidEd Insight can take the place of a data analyst by democratizing the NSC data and making it more digestible for most practitioners (counselors, principals, district
staff), then the minimums described above are much lower than the cost of a full-time employee to specifically do this work.
To find out more about the GuidEd Insight platform, I asked the team for a Q&A session. The responses below, which have been lightly edited for length and clarity, are from Chief Operations Officer Kelly Bay-Meyer, Vice President of Business Development
Alexander Jean-Baptise, and Product Manager Bello Dondja
Assuming they’re already aware of data from the NSC, and maybe even using it, give our readers the elevator pitch for why they should be interested in GuidEd Insight.
GuidEd Insight is a one-of-a-kind tool that increases the usability of NSC data so that staff members have the insights they need to help increase college access and success for all of their students, especially students from historically underrepresented
groups.
GuidEd Insight serves as both the most efficient/cost-effective way to analyze data and a data visualization tool that enables users to quickly and more accurately interpret the NSC data like no other tool or analysis engine. With virtually limitless
filtering capabilities, users are able to drill down as much as necessary to answer any questions they have about how well they are preparing their students from each demographic group for collegiate success thereby identifying equity gaps.
What are some of the most valuable “use cases” for working with the GuidEd Insight platform?
CBOs, schools, and school districts are using the GuidEd Insight tool to perform a variety of analyses to determine where inequities exist. The information garnered from the analyses enables them to put a plan of action in place to close equity gaps.
The GuidEd Insight platform will allow stakeholders to:
Determine which college prep programs are (not) helping students of any selected demographic group to enroll in and complete college.
Determine which demographic group is (not) successfully enrolling in and completing college after high school graduation.
Determine which students have stopped out prior to college graduation to initiate outreach services.
Determine which colleges have a high or poor track record for helping students of any selected demographic group graduate.
Determine which schools within a district are underperforming or overperforming in preparing any selected demographic for collegiate success.
Just how “plug and play” is the GuidEd Insight platform? Walk us through what onboarding looks like for a new user, what they have to have on hand, etc.
The onboarding process is quite simple. A user simply sets up their programs or schools and then uploads their NSC StudentTracker file and their student demographic file into our secure, cloud-based platform. Those are the few, easy steps to initiate
the data analysis of the GuidEd Insight tool.
Data mismatches can be an unfortunate fact of life for working with data from the NSC; how does GuidEd Insight allow for users to account for knowledge garnered from their advisers or conversations with students?
Even though NSC data is the only national data source for student-level college enrollment and graduation, and even though it captures most students accurately, gaps in NSC data continue to be a concern for our users. Regardless of whether data gaps are
due to a small percentage of colleges not participating in the NSC, FERPA blocks by students, student name changes, bad birthdates, or students with the same names and birthdates, missing or mismatched data is frustrating for districts and organizations.
This is especially true when they personally know that the individual student in question did enroll in college or did graduate from college.
To help address this concern, we are working toward a self-managed appeals process whereby users could add college enrollment or degree records to their dataset in GuidEd Insight based on other data sources, such as receiving a college transcript from
a student. These non-NSC records would be coded in the system to allow users to distinguish between NSC and non-NSC data sources.
“Natural language querying” is a feature that’s being tested now in the GuidEd Insight platform. Why is that function valuable for practitioners?
Natural language query allows users to type in the questions they have using their own words. We think this is valuable because it provides users with a place to ask their questions when they are not sure where to go in GuidEd Insight to find the answer
or if the question they are asking is not currently available in the tool (but could be answered using the underlying data). It also allows us to capture these questions to help inform future additions and enhancements to the tool.
You’ve got this great platform, and you’re ramping up subscribers. It may be premature to ask, but where does the platform go from here? What’s in the hopper for future upgrades, developments, and directions?
GuidEd Insight is designed to push insights to the user to make data actionable for staff who support students to and through college. An area that we have been discussing from the beginning is how to leverage predictive analytics to strengthen our College
Selection and Outreach Insights reports. For example, we could use predictive analytics to calculate an individual student’s likelihood of college completion at different colleges (as one additional piece of information in a student’s college selection
process) and to help identify students who are at risk of stopping out of college (to notify staff and support timely outreach).
Thank you to the GuidEd Insight team for their time and, well, insight. We'll keep an eye on the platform as it continues to progress!
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