Tennessee High Schools and Higher Education Institutions Can Now Send Electronic Transcripts to Each Other
By Missy Pyle, Guidance Secretary, Mount Juliet High School (Tennessee)
When I first started in the Mt. Juliet High School Counseling Office last year, electronic submission of transcripts to colleges and other high schools was not possible. We have approximately 2,200 students and 500 seniors, of which 94 percent go on to attend college, which meant we were sending an enormous amount of transcripts via the mail.
There was NO way to track and confirm that the college received a transcript. Schools, parents, and students would call at times saying they never received the transcript, so we would end up sending it more than once. You can imagine how frustrating this was for me and my colleagues.
Fortunately, throughout 2016, the Tennessee Higher Education Commission (THEC) worked with the National Student Clearinghouse to create the Tennessee Electronic Transcript Exchange. Now Mt. Juliet High School, and all Tennessee high schools, can exchange electronic transcript data of current and recent students with all Tennessee high schools and higher education institutions for free. Tennessee high schools can sign up to join the free Tennessee Electronic Transcript Exchange at https://studentclearinghouse.info/tn.
All the manual steps — pulling the students info, printing “x” number of copies for “x” number of colleges, stapling, folding, stuffing, address, and stamping the envelopes — was overwhelming at times. Since August 1, the Transcript Exchange has saved us 150 working hours and $700 in postage plus the costs for 1,400 envelopes and 5,000 pieces of paper.
To encourage participation, THEC and the Clearinghouse are bringing secondary and postsecondary institutions together on March 28 in Knoxville, March 29 in Nashville, and March 30 in Memphis. Because I am so supportive of this new service, I am speaking at the Nashville event to promote the value this new service brings to high schools and urge my peers to participate.
The service is completely user friendly and allows us to track where a transcript is in the exchange process and exactly when it is received by a college. No more questioning if the transcript arrived or not! When someone calls to say they haven’t received a transcript and/or ACT scores, I simply log in to the secure Transcript Exchange website, run a quick report, and review the details.
The only negative? I didn’t have it sooner!
Check it out for yourself. And if your state does not have a free transcript exchange service among all high schools and state postsecondary institutions, share my story with your high school and postsecondary colleagues.
“Now Mt. Juliet High School, and all Tennessee high schools, can exchange electronic transcript data of current and recent students with all Tennessee high schools and higher education institutions for free.”
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