By Bill DeBaun, Senior Director, Data and Strategic Initiatives
Reading time: Three minutes
National College Attainment Network (NCAN) members have heard us talk about the National Student Clearinghouse’s (NSC) StudentTracker 3.0 platform, which represents a major
enhancement to its StudentTracker for High Schools service. In exciting and welcome news, Michele Gralak, the StudentTracker secondary product manager, recently informed NCAN that the NSC has begun enabling current StudentTracker for High School subscribers
to access StudentTracker 3.0.
“We’re so excited to share StudentTracker 3.0 with our users and the response by users who have been migrated to the new platform has been quite positive. Users appreciate how easy it is to use and find the access to real-time data and the new learner
outcomes we added to be especially valuable,” Gralak said in a recent NSC blog. “We’ve been deliberate in our rollout of StudentTracker 3.0 since
it is so different from StudentTracker for High Schools in order to ensure users have time to get acquainted with the new platform.”
StudentTracker 3.0 is a welcome development for the college access and attainment field given the importance of being able to access, analyze, and share postsecondary outcomes data to improve programming for students and better understand program impact.
NCAN believes that StudentTracker is a critical tool for understanding what happens to students after high school graduation, and we’ve long advocated for its use by districts and schools and for states to expand postsecondary outcomes data sharing through
their own use of the platform.
StudentTracker 3.0 aims to improve on the current StudentTracker experience in a few ways. First, with interactive, filterable dashboards that allow for users to examine enrollment, persistence, and completion outcomes by various student characteristics.
Additionally, the platform moves away with “effective dates” and provides on-demand reports of postsecondary outcomes. More features are available at the NSC's blog..
The NSC’s StudentTracker 3.0 landing page includes various resources related to the new platform, including the 3.0 user manual, FAQs with mapping documents for the student-level
detail report and the analysis ready report, and Clearinghouse Academy tutorials. The NSC’s blog also offers insights into the benefits of the platform.
Related to the StudentTracker platform and other ways to use data effectively, NCAN recently transitioned its Data, Research, and Evaluation listserv (previously at ncan-data@ncan.org) to the NCAN Online Practitioner
Community (OPC) hosted on Slack. NCAN members can sign up for the OPC here where they can communicate topics like FAFSA, or Free Application for Federal Student Aid, and financial aid, data and research, and, soon, other topics of interest to the field!
Stay tuned to the NSC's website and the NCAN blog for more exciting updates about the StudentTracker platform!
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