Major gaps exist in our nation’s data on its postsecondary students. It’s difficult to track students across the education pipeline. Little data is available about individuals pursuing noncredit education. And we know less than we’d like about how well students succeed once they are in the workplace.
To develop targeted recommendations on how to improve the national postsecondary data infrastructure, the Institute for Higher Education Policy convened an expert working group that resulted in 11 policy papers. These papers examine overarching issues such as data connectivity, privacy and security as well as specific elements of the postsecondary data ecosystem such as federal student aid data systems, the National Student Clearinghouse and a proposed federal student unit record system.
In particular, Classroom to Career: Leveraging Employment Data to Measure Labor Market Outcomes from Rachel Zinn of the Workforce Data Quality Campaign (ACTE is a partner) reviews the available employment data and examines limitations and opportunities for connecting education and workforce data. It also proposes broad solutions and specific federal and state actions around:
- collecting more information on unemployment insurance (UI) wage records, such as occupation;
- improving data sharing across states; and
- building trust, legal frameworks and resources for data linkages.
The Certification Data Exchange Project, coordinated by ACTE, is testing out a solution to one facet of this problem: determining which students earn industry-recognized certifications and learning how these third-party industry certifications relate to their academic success. Learn more about what we’ve found with this fact sheet.
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