In early 2026, the National Student Clearinghouse will deploy an enhancement to help ensure student name and date of birth (DOB) are current and consistent with the identifiers in the NSLDS student profile. This is a significant change that applies to the NSLDS roster process for enrollment reporting for student aid compliance. While you may notice an initial increase in NSLDS Error Code 11, this enhancement will ultimately help reduce validation errors caused by inconsistences in student identifiers across systems.
What Is Staying the Same?
There is no change to the enrollment reporting format or process for reporting your school’s enrollment to the Clearinghouse.
What Is Changing?
The Clearinghouse receives and responds to the NSLDS roster distribution with current enrollment for each requested student. Historically, the response to the NSLDS roster maintained the student identifiers as they appeared on the NSLDS roster request file for the same Social Security number (SSN).
This enhancement revises the roster response process by reporting the student’s name and date of birth (DOB) as reflected in the Clearinghouse system.
The NSLDS roster process is driven by SSN and school code (OPEID). Therefore, NSLDS flags records with an Error Code 11 whenever the student name and/or DOB for the same SSN is different than what is on the NSLDS roster request file.
The NSLDS enrollment reporting guide appendices defines NSLDS Error Code 11 as, “the student identifiers (Student’s Social Security number, first name) submitted by a school do not match those for any student in the database.”
As part of the enhancement, functionality will be introduced on the Clearinghouse secure site’s NSLDS error correction platform to correct Error Code 11 for the “NSLDS” originator row. This includes increased transparency to display the student identifiers that NSLDS requested on the roster vs. student identifiers reflected in the Clearinghouse system.
Watch our tutorial on NSLDS Error Code 11. (Note: when you correct NSLDS errors, you should only work on the errors presented on the current NSLDS originator row.)
Please contact the Data Operations Team, schoolops@studentclearinghouse.org, with any questions.
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