About the PDP

The Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP) empowers institutions with more comprehensive data, easier analysis, centralized reporting functions, and better visual representations to help you understand, improve, and communicate student outcomes.

The PDP offers interactive dashboards that enable your institution to visualize student outcomes in aggregated and disaggregated forms and an analysis-ready file that lets you dig deeper into the data to find where you can make the biggest improvements on your campus.

Institutions can track of early momentum, long-term cohort, and non-cohort metrics using the PDP, including:

  • Credit thresholds earned by students in the first year
  • Successful completion of gateway Math and/or English in the first year
  • First-to second year persistence
  • College-level course completion rate in students’ first academic year
  • Proportion of students who earned a credential at submitting or another institution
  • Count of credentials awarded by submitting institution
  • Average completion time for credentials awarded by submitting institution

Watch the videos below to learn more about the PDP and how it can help your institution.

Introduction to the PDP

The Purpose of the PDP

Benefits of Using the PDP

  • PDP insights are based on a comprehensive set of student data, including information left out of other data collections.
  • The PDP’s early momentum indicators enable you to identify students who need help so that your institution can intervene earlier to help them get back on track.
  • PDP tools help you create visually compelling, easily understood reports that communicate trends and outcomes for your entire student body and specific populations within it.
  • The PDP reduces your reporting burden and cost by enabling you to submit data just once to report to many education organizations that your institution identifies to the Clearinghouse.

The PDP gives you:

  • Interactive dashboards that empower you to easily measure outcomes.
  • Powerful filtering tools for your institution’s deep, disaggregated data to enable comprehensive assessments of your students’ outcomes by cohort, cohort term, age, race, gender, Pell Grant status, GPA, first-generation-student status, and more.
  • Simpler reporting to third-party education organizations.
  • An analysis-ready file that lets you perform granular analysis and data comparison with other data sets.
  • Benchmarking data for comparisons with peer institutions.

Time Commitment

Time commitment required to participate in the PDP varies and is based on several factors: institution size, student information system, ease of data preparation, and reporting centralization. Some institutions have stated that the initial PDP implementation process can take up to a one work week to set up but also noted that careful review of the PDP instructions and guidelines at the outset of the process can lead to time savings later. Colleges also noted that subsequent rounds of data submissions required much less time.

Data Privacy

The Clearinghouse takes data privacy and security very seriously. PDP data is not public. The only place your data will be seen by other PDP participants is on the benchmark dashboards, but this data is displayed in groupings so that users cannot identify an individual institution.

Achieving the Dream (ATD), Complete College America (CCA), Jobs for the Future (JFF), the State Higher Education Officers Association (SHEEO), and more support the PDP. Institutions can opt to share data with these organizations through a data sharing agreement.

Personally-Identifiable Information

There are two versions of the analysis-ready file: The version that contains the student’s personally identifiable information (PII) is only sent to your institution through your secure FTP site. The de-identified version, which does not contain PII, is sent to authorized third parties and initiatives through their secure FTP sites. You will be able to review your dashboard metrics before any of your authorized third parties review them. We will send your analysis-ready file through your secure FTP site about one week before we update your Tableau dashboards.

FERPA Blocks

FERPA blocks are not applicable to PDP Tableau dashboards. FERPA blocks are applicable only to files/reports with PII. PDP Tableau dashboards and de-identified analysis-ready files do not contain PII.

Learn More

For more information about how the PDP works and the benefits of using it, visit https://www.studentclearinghouse.org/colleges/pdp.

The PDP Data Submission Process

There are eight steps in the PDP data submission process:

  1. You create data files formatted to PDP specifications.
  2. You upload the data files through a secure FTP site.
  3. The PDP system runs validation checks on the data files.
  4. If there are any validation errors, we work with you to resolve them and re-submit the data file(s).
  5. Once any validation errors are resolved, you certify the data files to confirm that they are complete.
  6. The PDP system runs data quality checks on the data files.
  7. If there are any data quality errors, we work with you to resolve them.
  8. Once any data quality errors are resolved, the PDP system processes and generates dashboards and an analysis-ready file.

Watch the video below to learn more about the PDP process.


 

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