National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) Transmission Updates – December 2018

Two enhancements to the NSC enrollment transmission files were made this month to facilitate institutional research and reporting at both the institutional and UW System level. The first was requested by the UWS Office of Policy, Analysis and Research to support their retention and graduation reports while the second was requested by UW’s Academic Planning and Institutional Research team to support our participation in the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE). Both rely on the NSC’s Student Tracker for their data and, in both cases, we needed to include additional data elements that the NSC deems “optional.” As such, we modified our transmission to include two data elements that have always been reported but now are redundantly included in fields accessible by the Student Tracker (CIP codes and Major Course of Study descriptions) and two data elements that we have not previously reported (gender and race/ethnicity). In the case of race/ethnicity, we collaborated with Jocelyn Milner and Clare Huhn in APIR to use the UWS and IPEDS algorithm in determining how to translate our SIS values to the NSC values to ensure alignment and consistency.