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Postsecondary Data Partnership

Measure student outcomes.
Grow student success.

The Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP) is a nationwide effort to help colleges and universities gain a fuller picture of student progress and outcomes, meet various reporting requirements, and identify where to focus their resources. Both institutions and educational organizations can participate in the PDP.

Postsecondary Data Partnership

Measure student outcomes.
Grow student success.

The Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP) is a nationwide effort to help colleges and universities gain a fuller picture of student progress and outcomes, meet various reporting requirements, and identify where to focus their resources. Both institutions and educational organizations can participate in the PDP.

Already participate in the PDP?
Access the user portal.

Already participate in the PDP?  Access the user portal.

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Gain richer insights

PDP participants gain access to richer insights on student success, including information left out of other data collections. The PDP has data on all new students at the institution, not just full-time fall freshmen, as well as benchmarking data on peer institutions.

Close equity gaps

The PDP’s early momentum indicators make it easier to identify student populations that need help. That means intervention can occur earlier, and you can help get learners back on track sooner.

Tell your story

Tell your institution’s or initiative’s story with visually compelling, easily understood reports that communicate trends and outcomes for the entire student body and specific populations within it.

Institutions can also opt-in to the Student Insights Dashboard to publicly share learner progress and outcomes information.

Save time & resources

The PDP makes data submission easier, both for institutions and for the educational organizations they work with. Institutions submit their data once, and the Clearinghouse validates the data and shares it with all organizations the institution selects.

How Your Learners Benefit

The PDP will transform the way your institution measures and reports learner progress so that every learner can thrive. You’ll learn which learners need support, and when and how to support them, so you can help learners succeed while they’re still enrolled.

Unique National Data Source

Data provided by participating PDP institutions is different from other national public and private sources of information. That’s because the PDP captures rich information on learners and combines it with financial aid information so you can examine early momentum metrics, such as credit accumulation and course completion, and explore equity gaps across multiple dimensions, such as gender, race/ethnicity, enrollment intensity, college placement level, and more.

PDP captures data sources such as demographics, courses enrolled in, credits earned, college placement, enrollment information, grades, high school performance, degree completion, credits attempted, Pell Grant status, and much more!

*Pell Grant status should only be used for the application, award, administration, or evaluation of financial aid programs.

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For colleges & universities

  • Gain access to richer insights. The PDP includes data on all your new students, not just full-time fall freshmen.
  • Close equity gaps. The PDP’s early momentum indicators enable you to identify students who need help so you can intervene earlier.
  • Tell your institution’s story with visually compelling, easily understood reports on trends and outcomes for your entire student body and specific populations within it.
  • Showcase accountability. By opting into the Student Insights Dashboard, you can publicly display verified, de-identified student progress and outcome information.
  • Benchmark against peer institutions. The PDP enables you to compare your institution’s progress and outcomes with those of its peers to gauge your work’s success.
  • Save time and resources. With the PDP, you submit data just once to report it to the many education organizations that your institution identifies to the Clearinghouse.
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For educational organizations

  • Reduce administrative burden. With the PDP, there’s no need to maintain your own data submission platform. Plus, PDP data is consistent across institutions, states, regions, and the country.
  • Increase participation in your initiatives. PDP-participating institutions are more likely to join your initiatives because they won’t need to submit additional data.
  • More accurately measure learner progress. The PDP’s insights include data on all new students who enter an institution at any time, not just full-time fall freshmen.
  • Grow learner success and close equity gaps. The PDP provides the data you need to measure and support progress toward your goals, such as improving student momentum, retention, and completion rates and closing equity gaps.
  • Highlight your initiatives’ success. The PDP helps you track success by state, type of institution, and initiative, letting you measure and share the impact of your initiatives.

Features You’ll Love

  • Interactive dashboards that let you easily measure student outcomes.
  • Subgroup gap analysis for easy exploration of differences in academic progress and outcomes between multiple small populations of students.
  • National benchmarking reports that help you understand the national trends in postsecondary education with reports using the power of PDP data and metrics.
  • Powerful multivariable filtering tools to analyze deep, disaggregated data characteristics, such as age, race, gender, cohort term, first-generation student status, and more.

Colleges and universities also get these features:

  • Benchmarking data for comparisons with peer institutions.
  • Analysis-ready files displaying one row per student for granular analysis and data comparisons with other data sets.
  • Simpler reporting to education organizations and associations.
  • The ability to grant dashboard access to multiple users across campus — at no extra cost.
  • The option of sharing your PDP data publicly on the Student Insights Dashboard — no additional data submission needed.

How the PDP Works

PDP 3-step process graphic
PDP 3-step process graphic

The PDP Dashboards

Gateway-Course Completion

Measure math and English gateway-course completion rates to identify early whether students are on track.

Credit Completion Ratio

Find out how successful students are at completing the credits they attempt in their first academic year. This is a leading indicator of a student’s progress toward completion of a credential.

Retention and Persistence

Learn the number of students who complete their studies on the campus where they started (retention) and the number who continue their education at another institution (persistence).

Transfers

Discover the rate at which students are transferring to other institutions and the credentials they earn pre- or post-transfer.

Outcome Measures

See learners’ completion rates and earned credentials throughout their education journey (at two-, four-, six-, or eight-year intervals), whether they are enrolled at their starting institution, enrolled at another institution, or no longer enrolled.

Credentials Conferred and Time to Credential

Measure how many credentials learners obtained in a given year, how long it took the learners to earn those credentials, and which groups of learners took longer to earn the credentials.

Benchmarking

(for institutions only)

Compare your institution’s outcomes with those of peer institutions.

Our Partners

Discover the education organizations that are using the PDP to help institutions and learners succeed. Once your institution signs up for the PDP, you can easily share your interactive dashboards and analysis-ready files with any of these partners.


“With the PDP, the return on investment is tremendous.”

Laurie Heacock

Senior Advisor, Data and Analytics, Achieving the Dream, Inc.


“The PDP allows you to conduct a subgroup gap analysis and easily visualize equity gaps to understand what’s really going on. The visual format makes equity gaps clear, even to people not used to working with data.”

Eric Godin

Associate Vice President, State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO)


“The meticulous data we’ve been able to gather has helped us make better decisions about where to invest resources at a time when we literally can’t afford to make a bad decision.”

Tony Scinta

Executive Provost, Nevada State College

YouTube Video: How the Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP) Empowers Data-Driven Decisions
YouTube Video: How the PDP Helps Education Organizations and Institutions Collaborate

Get started with the PDP

Complete the form below. A PDP representative will reach out to you to discuss how the PDP can transform how your institution measures student success.

National Student Clearinghouse is trusted and secure

Our Commitment to Data Security and Privacy

All Clearinghouse services facilitate compliance with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), The Higher Education Act, and other applicable laws. The Clearinghouse also respects all participating institutions’ policies concerning the release of student data to third parties.

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