PDP Data-Driven Insights

Do you need evidence-based insights to inform your institution’s student success interventions?

Whether you want to identify practices and policies that inequitably affect students, measure your institution’s strategic progress, or compare your institution with its peers, the Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP) provides the data you need.

The PDP offers interactive dashboards that let you visualize student outcomes in aggregated and disaggregated forms, and an analysis-ready file that lets you look deeper into the data to find where you can make the biggest improvements on your campus. Data is displayed in a one-row-per-student format to facilitate analysis.

PDP Dashboard Metrics

Achieve earlier identification of student populations that would benefit from support, using the PDP’s early momentum indicators. Watch trends for your current cohort of students as they progress through your institution or move on to others.

With metrics based on a national framework reflecting a decade of data and insights, the PDP dashboards can help your institution transform success metrics into actual success.

Gateway-Course Completion. Identify early whether your students are on track by using the PDP to measure math and English gateway-course completion rates.

Credit Accumulation Rate. Determine what proportion of your students are progressing toward credential completion. See which students are earning sufficient credits in their first year and which need more support.

Credit Completion Ratio. Find out how successful students have been at completing the credits they attempted in their first academic year. This is a leading indicator of a student’s progress toward completion of a credential.

Retention and Persistence. Get a fuller picture of your students’ achievements. Success is measured not only by the number of students who complete their studies on your campus (retention) but also by the number who continue their education elsewhere (persistence). The PDP applies comprehensive enrollment and degree data from the National Student Clearinghouse to tell you about student outcomes on your campus and beyond.

Transfers. See a snapshot view of your institution’s transfer rate, as well as more detailed information about students’ outcomes after they transfer.

Outcome Measures. Review your students’ completion rates and earned credentials throughout their education journey. The PDP enables you to review outcomes at two-, four-, six-, or eight-year intervals for enrolled students and students who are no longer enrolled. It also enables you to review the credentials the students earned and whether the students are still enrolled at your institution or another.

Credentials Conferred and Time to Credential. Measure how many credentials students obtained in a given year, how long it took students to obtain their credentials, and which groups of students take longer to attain those credentials.

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

The Analysis-Ready File

In addition to the easy-to-use and easy-to-share interactive dashboards, the PDP provides an analysis-ready file with insights that can be organized by aggregated and disaggregated data. The file is built with student-identifying information and displayed in a one-row-per-student format to enable your institution to perform a granular-level analysis of your data and take informed actions based on the metrics.

With the analysis-ready file, you can:

• Create your own college-defined cohorts and conduct additional inquiries.
• Match the data to other information sets, such as early alert data and other predictive analytics.
• Identify student populations that require additional help, so your institution can strategically intervene and design early support systems.

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