Implementing a Student-Level Data Network (Part III): Insights from Financial Aid Experts
Published Jan 2022
We cannot continue to ask students – and their families – to make one of the largest and most important investments of their lives without clearer information about what their time and money will yield. Fortunately, support is broad across the country and across the political spectrum for a federal student-level data network (SLDN), which would streamline data reporting and answer key questions about students’ postsecondary outcomes.
Anticipating the questions that would fall to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to answer in building and maintaining an SLDN, RTI International (RTI), a nonprofit research institute, joined IHEP, the leader of the Postsecondary Data Collaborative, both acting in an independent capacity to host a series of expert convenings to outline issues surrounding the SLDN’s construction and implementation.
Implementing a Student-Level Data Network (Part III): Insights from Financial Aid Experts is the third brief in the series emerging from those convenings to support the modernization of our postsecondary data infrastructure. The is based on individual conversations with 20 experts and a convening of 9 expert panelists from diverse institutional backgrounds, all with extensive experience in financial aid data and policy. Today’s brief shares expert insights on data elements, institutional burden, timing of reporting, and use of data.