Four Things to Know about the Clearinghouse’s PDF-to-Data Solution
PDF-to-Data solves the problems that arise when postsecondary institutions receive student transcripts in PDF format. It converts PDF transcripts from a sending school to machine-readable formats that are recommended by the Postsecondary Education Standards Council (PESC), TS 130 (EDI) or PESC XML. Within minutes of receiving the student’s PDF transcript, PDF-to-Data converts the PDF and sends the PESC-approved standard data files to an institution’s National Student Clearinghouse account, ready for use in the school’s student information system or CRM.
Here are four things schools should know about PDF-to-Data.
1. It’s hassle-free for schools
There is no hardware or software for institutions to download or maintain. PDF-to-Data is software-as-a-service (SaaS), and everything is maintained on the Clearinghouse’s side. The only thing a school needs to do once it signs up is to send 10 transcripts from each of the school’s most common transcript senders, which will be used to create templates for the system to use when parsing data.
2. It uses AI
PDF-to-Data is a closed system that uses AI to take a PDF transcript, apply it to the templates (developed from your sample transcripts), and convert the data on the PDF into the appropriate field on the template. It’s the kind of limited use case that is perfect for AI because it can fill in the data files using the template’s rules faster and more accurately than humans can.
3. Its accuracy is out of this world
Speaking of accuracy, we conducted a pilot to assess how well PDF-to-Data worked in real-world situations. During the pilot, PDF-to-Data processed 200 transcripts with about 50,000 data elements. The system read the templates as they were set up and correctly converted the data, achieving better than 99.9% accuracy.
4. It frees up school staff to focus on customer service and other initiatives
PDF-to-Data frees up existing admissions and registrar’s office staff from tedious manual data entry, so they can spend more time helping students and families directly, answering questions, doing higher-level work, and participating in new initiatives across the institution. At a time when schools are being squeezed and asked to do more with less, PDF-to-Data gives schools back valuable staff time.
