The StudentTracker Process (5 minutes)
Get an overview of the StudentTracker process for request files and single student search.
This session is intended for post-secondary institutions active with StudentTracker for Colleges & Universities.
Resources
Transcript
StudentTracker is your source for nationwide postsecondary education information, enrollment and outcomes. Some of the questions that you can use StudentTracker to answer are you're trying to get information about enrollment trends. Either for current, potential or former students. For the folks in IR or doing any kind of research, you want to get a complete prior academic history of incoming students. All of our reports are user friendly and give you data that is presented in a way that is intuitive, clear and complete. We hear from some schools that are not using StudentTracker that they are getting this information either through survey or anecdotal information. For survey information, you often don't get good responses and people don't give clear or complete information. Whereas with the Clearinghouse, we do cross state lines. We do have 98% of the enrollment. So, we're able to give you a much more complete and thorough picture. So how does the StudentTracker system or product work? Somebody at your school and it can be somebody in research, it can be somebody in admissions, the registrar, whomever, will submit through our secure FTP a request file. This is a file of students that you want to get postsecondary data on. And once you submit it through FTP, we then have a sweeper that picks that up and depending upon what kind of information you're looking on, your file then processes through our StudentTracker system. What happens there is that we look in our system to see whether we're able to find the student and then if we are able to find the student, we want to know whether they have records that fit the search criteria and search window and then lastly does the student have any FERPA blocks on those records. Once we get all of that information, we then compile what we're able to return that's appropriate for your search into StudentTracker reports. You get an email letting you know that they are ready. You come back to that secure FTP site at that point and you're able to access those reports. Generally, if the files are smaller, they can process in about 30 minutes. If they are larger, they could take up to a day or two. How does a person get access to submit reports for StudentTracker? When a school joins with StudentTracker, quite often the contacts for the StudentTracker account are the person that signed the contract, which often is a Provost or a VP, as well as generally maybe a registrar and somebody in billing. But those aren't necessarily the folks that are going to be submitting these request files. So the people that are submitting the request files to run through StudentTracker are going to be doing so through the FTP account. So you would need to have your name added as a user for that FTP account. So there are two areas where you would be able to get functionality. One would be that FTP site where you upload and download files. The other site that you would use is the user interface and that's where you go in to see your file status, look at your prior files submitted and then if you are a premium, customer access that functionality. We do have single student search, which is available in the application. It doesn't provide the comprehensive search tool that a batch does. You can query a single student. And the information that you use and get is going to be dependent upon your role and your access. So it depends upon whether you are in institutional research or admissions or financial aid as to what data you get back. So the con of it is that you have to have the information exactly matching what we have in our system. The pro is that you can do only one student at a time and you do get those results fairly immediately. Regardless of whether you are an admissions officer or whether you are in career student services, whether you deal with enrollment or IR or even if you're teaching, we hope that the StudentTracker service will provide you benefit and get answers to some of your questions. There are free guides and Clearinghouse Academy tutorials.
