Access the Reports (5 minutes)

Learn to download the StudentTracker for High Schools reports from you FTP receive folder.

Video Transcript

Some folks asked where to get the PDF reports that Clearinghouse generates after an effective date. So I will go into the FTP account and show you how to get them.

Starting at studentclearinghouse.org. Over in the upper right, click FTP login. FTP stands for file transfer protocol. It's actually a secure method of transmitting data. When we first started, this was pretty fabulous technology. This was how colleges submitted their student data. So it was extremely important that that data be protected, and most of our services still use FTP. So whoever is on your FTP will come out here.

Click the sign on with username and password button. Then enter your account's shared username and password and click sign on. When your account was set up, there were folks who were designated to be a technical contact responsible for uploading your student graduates. Typically, it is someone who's more technically oriented because they're going to go out to your SIS, run a script, and pull out the data, and then have it formatted in the way that we need.

This is our Clearinghouse test account. So you see the username and our name listed under full name in the table. When you log into your FTP, you're going to see something like this. I'm a Clearinghouse user, and I have what we call this super user access, but yours is similar. Click on the username.

On the page, under general information, notifications has the list of emails that are on your FTP account. So here I have my email address, and then this is my colleague. He and I are on this FTP. The credentials for the FTP site are shared. This is important. Our username is listed here at the top of the general information section, and then Puran and I have to share the password to get here. So whoever is on your FTP, you need to understand that because they're the ones that are going to upload data. But more importantly, when the reports are back, they're going to go into the folder and get those reports.

Let's go to home folder. You're going to see the receive and the receive archive folders. So in receive, this is where your reports go, and they stay here for 45 days. And you're going to see the dates. So something was just created here just the other day. And again, our test account, so you're going to see tons of stuff in here. But every time we generate reports on an effective date, you will always get a student-level detail with detail in the name. And over here on the far right is where you download it. And you're always going to get another row that is your packet of aggregate reports. And hovering over the name, you should be able to see this is a zip folder. And in the world of technology, zip means it's a way to combine a ton of files into one folder that makes it easier to transmit. So I'm going to come over here, see this action. It's a download button.

When you download, you're going to see something like this. It's opening. It's on my other screen. I see a little box pop up that tells me to open the file. Sometimes it goes to your desktop. But when you open it, it looks something like this. So the basic packet, here's the PDF, here's the demographics, and here's the academic. Here's your top 25. And based on what type of account you have, the first ones are always at the account level. So it might be the district or it might be that consortium. But then it breaks down a set of the exact same reports for each individual high school. So again, this is our test account. When you open it, this is for the high school. This is small. I have been to some districts that have 50, 75 high schools. So this is a huge list, but at least you can see how to get to your report, how we're returning them, that there's the aggregate for the account and the individual high schools that you can share. If you only have one high school in your district, then your district report and your high school report are exactly the same.

Let's go back to the FTP home folder. The reports are available in the receive folder for 45 days. What happens after those 45 days? You can see there's the receive and receive archive folder. After 45 days, they moved to archive where they stay for another 45 days and then after that they're lost. Please download those reports when you get the notification that the reports have been sent there. And once you download them, I hope you have somewhere in your systems where you have secure folders to put this data to share with your colleagues. If you have questions, you can send an email to StudentTracker@studentclearinghouse.org. This is the StudentTracker specific email. Thank you for joining.