Post-Secondary Data Community of Practice

In Fall 2021, AACRAO received a $1.2 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Part of this grant is to increase awareness and steward efforts in the use of post-secondary data in higher education to advance credit mobility and leverage data as a strategic enrollment management tool.  

We have been exploring opportunities among AACRAO members utilizing the NSC Post-Secondary Data Partnership (PDP) and connecting with organizations equally focused on improving efforts for data exchange across institutions. 

At the time the grant was awarded, nearly half of institutions who signed up had not yet managed to load their data into the PDP.  In an effort to understand the issues institutions faced loading their data and to help institutions understand the barriers institutions face, AACRAO interviewed a large group of institutions and developed a report documenting these issues. 

 For those institutions that have successfully loaded data into the PDP, the next challenge is to leverage that data as part of their strategic enrollment management framework.  AACRAO has two videos discussing how this is done from two different perspectives.

The first is an AACRAO webinar presented by the National Student Clearinghouse Using the Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP) as part of your SEM Toolkit.  This webinar focuses on the tools and data available in the PDP through dashboards and the Analysis Ready file.

The second presentation is an example of an institution using the PDP to inform their SEM activities. Northeast Lakeview College presented Decision Support Ecosystem: Student Success through a Culture of Care at the 2023 AACRAO Annual Meeting. The presentation, discusses the college’s efforts to improve student outcomes, highlighting the tools used with a focus on the PDP.

Due to a recording error, 3 slides were lost between 8:37 and 8:45 in the recording. The missing slides without narration can be found here.

As the PDP and institutional participation continue to evolve, we are creating an associated Community of Practice and we would like to identify members that are particularly interested in the use of post-secondary data as a strategic tool to advance the registrar and enrollment management profession. We invite interested AACRAO Members to join this Community of Practice and stay up to date on these efforts.