The Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP)
Authors: National Student Clearinghouse
Publication Date: Ongoing
Format: Website
Lay the GroundworkStart the ProcessSharpen the FocusAct with PurposeSustain and Evolve
Strategic Data Use
Core StaffFacultyMid-Level Leaders
All Institution Types
The Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP) is a, nationwide, subscription-based student data platform designed to support institutions measure, analyze, and improve student outcomes. For institutions with lean or growing institutional research capacity, participation in the PDP can dramatically enhance the way you measure and report students’ progress toward a credential. It provides metrics for all new students—not just full-time, first-time cohorts—and includes early momentum indicators that reflect critical transition points. The PDP also offers disaggregated data, benchmarking across peer institutions, and dashboards that make performance insights actionable. Pricing is based on institutional size using a sliding scale.
Connections to the Transformation Journey
and How Institutions Transform
Stages of Transformation
Lay the GroundworkStart the ProcessSharpen the FocusAct with PurposeSustain and Evolve
- Lay the Groundwork: The PDP helps establish a foundation of student data critical for communicating the urgency of institutional transformation.
- Start the Process: Early momentum metrics from the PDP help institutions set a shared baseline that reflects the full student population and supports buy-in for equity-focused transformation.
- Sharpen the Focus: The platform enables teams to review disaggregated student data and explore opportunities for dramatically impacting the student experience and use those data to set detailed, equity-centered goals to guide transformation efforts.
- Act with Purpose: PDP metrics simplify the development of implementation plans by providing shared definitions and helping teams align meso- and micro-level metrics with institutional targets.
- Sustain and Evolve: Dashboards and longitudinal metrics support regular progress monitoring and ensure that institutions can track the impact of reforms on student outcomes over time.
Learn more about the Transformation Journey and How Institutions Transform.
Core Institutional Capacities
Strategic Data Use
- Strategic Data Use: The PDP strengthens an institution’s capacity for strategic data use in multiple ways:
- Its robust intake and verification process ensures data integrity at the outset, often prompting important internal discussions that help clarify definitions and test long-held assumptions about who’s counted and when.
- Its dashboards and analysis-ready files help democratic data across an institution, making it easier to integrate real, timely student data into important decisions.
- Wide-reaching institutional participation in the PDP enables benchmarking of important student success metrics against peers and like-institutions, offering ways to further contextualize data beyond the use of trends over time or comparing sections within an individual institution.
Learn more about the Transformation Journey and How Institutions Transform.
Continuous Improvement
This resource is most relevant to the following cross-functional roles:
- Senior Leaders: it provides senior leaders with critical student data for communicating the urgent need for institutional transformation, setting ambitious targets grounded in reality, and holding the institution accountable to those targets.
- Mid-Level Leaders: it is a powerful tool for mid-level leaders to use when leading teams in reflecting on opportunities for improvement, guiding the development of action plans, collecting data to track progress, and assessing the impact of transformation efforts over time.
- Core Staff: while participating in the PDP requires an upfront investment of time and attention, it can save many institutions time and actually accelerate the pace of transformation by supplementing capacity of Institutional Research teams.
- Faculty: it can be an invaluable tool for department chairs and individual faculty seeking vetted data at a level of detail often unavailable within the institution, that stretch multiple years and can highlight trends that would otherwise require significant time and energy to develop from scratch.
This resource connects to the following phase(s) of the PRPAM framework:
- Prepare: Useful for institutions beginning a continuous improvement process by offering well-defined, disaggregated metrics that help establish a shared baseline of the student experience—supporting early buy-in for transformation across the institution.
- Reflect: Useful for institutions reflecting on opportunities for improvement by enabling teams to analyze trends and equity gaps across student populations, helping pinpoint where reforms can have the greatest impact.
- Prioritize: Useful for institutions that have identified critical opportunities for improvement by offering shared measures of success that help institutions set clear, equity-centered targets to guide transformation efforts.
- Act: Useful for institutions turning to implementation by helping content experts in identifying meso- and micro-level metrics aligned to macro-level goals—streamlining implementation and performance tracking.
- Monitor: Useful for institutions seeking clear reference points for monitoring progress against targets of transformation initiatives and tracking their impact on major student outcomes.
Learn more about the Transformation Journey and How Institutions Transform.
Stages of Transformation
Lay the GroundworkStart the ProcessSharpen the FocusAct with PurposeSustain and Evolve
- Lay the Groundwork: The PDP helps establish a foundation of student data critical for communicating the urgency of institutional transformation.
- Start the Process: Early momentum metrics from the PDP help institutions set a shared baseline that reflects the full student population and supports buy-in for equity-focused transformation.
- Sharpen the Focus: The platform enables teams to review disaggregated student data and explore opportunities for dramatically impacting the student experience and use those data to set detailed, equity-centered goals to guide transformation efforts.
- Act with Purpose: PDP metrics simplify the development of implementation plans by providing shared definitions and helping teams align meso- and micro-level metrics with institutional targets.
- Sustain and Evolve: Dashboards and longitudinal metrics support regular progress monitoring and ensure that institutions can track the impact of reforms on student outcomes over time.
Learn more about the Transformation Journey and How Institutions Transform.
Core Institutional Capacities
Strategic Data Use
- Strategic Data Use: The PDP strengthens an institution’s capacity for strategic data use in multiple ways:
- Its robust intake and verification process ensures data integrity at the outset, often prompting important internal discussions that help clarify definitions and test long-held assumptions about who’s counted and when.
- Its dashboards and analysis-ready files help democratic data across an institution, making it easier to integrate real, timely student data into important decisions.
- Wide-reaching institutional participation in the PDP enables benchmarking of important student success metrics against peers and like-institutions, offering ways to further contextualize data beyond the use of trends over time or comparing sections within an individual institution.
Learn more about the Transformation Journey and How Institutions Transform.
Continuous Improvement
This resource is most relevant to the following cross-functional roles:
- Senior Leaders: it provides senior leaders with critical student data for communicating the urgent need for institutional transformation, setting ambitious targets grounded in reality, and holding the institution accountable to those targets.
- Mid-Level Leaders: it is a powerful tool for mid-level leaders to use when leading teams in reflecting on opportunities for improvement, guiding the development of action plans, collecting data to track progress, and assessing the impact of transformation efforts over time.
- Core Staff: while participating in the PDP requires an upfront investment of time and attention, it can save many institutions time and actually accelerate the pace of transformation by supplementing capacity of Institutional Research teams.
- Faculty: it can be an invaluable tool for department chairs and individual faculty seeking vetted data at a level of detail often unavailable within the institution, that stretch multiple years and can highlight trends that would otherwise require significant time and energy to develop from scratch.
This resource connects to the following phase(s) of the PRPAM framework:
- Prepare: Useful for institutions beginning a continuous improvement process by offering well-defined, disaggregated metrics that help establish a shared baseline of the student experience—supporting early buy-in for transformation across the institution.
- Reflect: Useful for institutions reflecting on opportunities for improvement by enabling teams to analyze trends and equity gaps across student populations, helping pinpoint where reforms can have the greatest impact.
- Prioritize: Useful for institutions that have identified critical opportunities for improvement by offering shared measures of success that help institutions set clear, equity-centered targets to guide transformation efforts.
- Act: Useful for institutions turning to implementation by helping content experts in identifying meso- and micro-level metrics aligned to macro-level goals—streamlining implementation and performance tracking.
- Monitor: Useful for institutions seeking clear reference points for monitoring progress against targets of transformation initiatives and tracking their impact on major student outcomes.
Learn more about the Transformation Journey and How Institutions Transform.
Recommended Citation: National Student Clearinghouse. (n.d.). Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP). https://www.studentclearinghouse.org/solutions/ed-insights/pdp/
