Postsecondary Enrollment Data are provided through a contracted linkage with The National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit education organization. Participating public and private colleges and universities provide enrollment and graduation data to the Clearinghouse at regular intervals The Clearinghouse includes U.S. institutions enrolling 98 percent of all students.
The National Student Clearinghouse’s StudentTracker is the nationwide source of independently verified college enrollment and degree data. StudentTracker is available to participating institutions, governments, and researchers for educational research and analyses.
After contracting with NSC for data linkages. Client level identifiers are securely submitted to the Clearinghouse and anonymized data from student tracker is returned. Identifiers include first name, last name, middle initial, suffix, date of birth, and unique source id. The student detail return data elements include: college code, college name, college state, type of college (less 2 year, 2 year, 4 year), public /private designation, enrollment begin and end dates, enrollment status (part time, full-time, etc.), class level (freshman, sophomore, etc.), enrollment and NCES CIP code for up to 2 majors, graduation indicators, graduation date, degree type, degree major and NCES CIP code for up to 4 majors, and college sequence indicators.
One limitation of the NSC data is record blocking. Records can be blocked by the student (i.e., under FERPA the student indicates that they do not want their college records to be disclosed) or less commonly by the school. In the Report Summary document delivered with the return student detail file, NSC indicates how many youth in the query have blocked records. Typically, this proportion is ~ 10%. Since individual students with blocked records are not identified, they cannot be distinguished from youth who truly did not enroll in postsecondary education (i.e., both return a “no record found”). This means that there is a proportion of youth who did enroll (and possibly earned a degree) that show up as “no record found” in the NSC data.
CCWIP NSC_FC derived file includes postsecondary enrollment data from NSC for all children age 16 and older (born ~1988-2003) with a record of an out-of-home foster care placement in the Child Welfare Services / Case Management System (CWS/CMS) since January 1, 2010. Once a client reaches age 24 their record is removed from the Student Tracker Linkage Query.
CCWIP staff merge the return data with previous NSC extracts to create a longitudinal file of enrollment records for each client. Additional data cleaning is performed during this merge. Specifically, return records are matched to the base ID file to ensure consistency, and when duplicate records for individuals (i.e., same client, institution and start date) are found the earlier record is purged so that the most updated enrollment data is captured.