Bill DeBaun, Senior Director of Data and Strategic Initiatives
Reading time: Three minutes
The National College Attainment Network's (NCAN) Common Measures are a set of research-backed, member-developed college access and success indicators. First released more than 10 years
ago in 2012, the Common Measures are an excellent reference for NCAN member organizations that want to measure how their students are faring.
The indicators comprising the Common Measures are associated with the two main outcomes NCAN members help their students pursue: postsecondary enrollment and postsecondary completion. Under those two headings are essential indicators, which NCAN continues
to be the most critical given their connection to enrollment and completion, as well as optional indicators which add more context to the work depending on program model, and demographic characteristics, which help to disaggregate results and look
for inequitable trends.
Prelude aside, what are the actual measures? The full list of indicators and their associated references are available in a handy quick reference.
Notably these are presented as program-level variables (e.g., the percent of a program’s students who accomplish or are on-track for the indicator). The essential indicators include:
Access:
Percent of students on track to/completing common core/rigorous college prep curriculum as defined by their state.
Average High School GPA.
Percent of students taking SAT.
Percent of students taking ACT.
Percent of students completing college admissions applications, by school type.
Percent of students who complete and submit a FAFSA form.
Percent of students awarded financial aid.
Success:
Percent of students who enroll within six months of high school graduation.
Student enrollment by institution type and status (full time vs. part time).
Percent of students placed into remedial courses (English/math).
Year to year student persistence.
Term to Term student persistence.
Percent of students completing a degree within 150% of time, by school type.
Percent of students who complete and submit renewal FAFSA form.
Percent of students awarded financial aid.
NCAN also has a Common Measures Handbook that dives into each indicator and discusses the research evidence behind including it. It’s
not compelling reading, admittedly, but it is a handy reference and literature review rolled into one.
Lastly, although the Common Measures are largely focused on students in high school and college, there are many NCAN member programs who work with students starting in middle school. Through a similar collaborative process, NCAN released the Common Measures for Middle School, which largely revolve around keeping students on-track to be successful in high school.
By sharing these common indicators widely, NCAN hopes to:
Make it easier for college access and success organizations to decide which data to track.
Increase collection and use of data to guide improvements to student services and demonstrate the effectiveness of the college access-success field.
Enhance equitable outcomes for subgroups of students.
Help standardize expectations from funders and other stakeholders about evaluation metrics.
Lay the groundwork for future benchmarking so that NCAN members can more easily learn about the effective practices of other organizations.
The process for developing the Common Measures was iterative. MorraLee Keller, NCAN’s Senior Director of Strategic Programming, worked with members to better understand which indicators they had access to, could track consistently, and trusted to provide
a reasonable sense of how their programs were doing. The results from those conversations with members then intersected with the college access and attainment literature to see which of these indicators were supported as valid by rigorous research.
After launching, NCAN hosted the Common Measures Learning Community, a group of 20 member organizations focused on how to use data to scale program capacity and improve program performance. This two-year project led to the creation of NCAN’s Data and Evaluation Toolkit and also kicked off intensive work around using the National Student Clearinghouse’s StudentTracker data to examine students’ postsecondary outcomes.
NCAN is here to assist members, and the field more broadly, with using data to help advance successful student outcomes. Have a question about how to use data more effectively? Reach out to me at debaunb@ncan.org,
I’d be happy to chat!
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