PDP Data-Driven Insights

Whether you’re helping institutions improve retention and graduation rates, enabling them to better support underserved communities on campus, or empowering them to close achievement gaps, the Postsecondary Data Partnership provides the data you need to measure and report progress toward your goals.

The PDP offers interactive dashboards that enable your organization to visualize student outcomes in aggregated and disaggregated forms and a de-identified analysis-ready file that lets you dig deeper into the data to find where you can make the biggest improvements. 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 intervention, using the PDP’s early momentum indicators. With metrics based on a national metrics framework built from a decade of data and insights, the PDP dashboards can help your organization transform success metrics into actual success.

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

Credit Accumulation Rate. Determine what proportion of 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 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. Get the full picture on student achievement. Success is measured not only by the number of students who complete their studies on the campus where they started (retention) but also by the number who continue their education at another institution (persistence). The PDP applies comprehensive enrollment and degree data from the National Student Clearinghouse to tell you about student outcomes on the campuses of the institutions you work with and beyond.

Transfers. Learn about students’ outcomes after they transfer. The PDP provides the rate at which students are transferring from a particular institution to another institution and the credentials they earn pre- or post-transfer.

Outcome Measures. See 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 review of the credentials the students earned and whether the students are still enrolled at their starting institution or at 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.

Dashboard displays can be filtered by:

• Academic preparedness in math and English
• Age
• Attendance status
• Cohort
• Cohort term
• Credential type sought
• Dual and summer enrollment
• Enrollment status
• First-generation-student status
• Gender
• GPA range
• Pell Grant* status
• Race/ethnicity

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

Check out our PDP tutorials to learn more!

• Introduction to PDP
• File Submission
• Getting to Know the Dashboards
• Using the Dashboards to Answer Research Questions

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