Explore the basic functionality of the National Student Clearinghouse’s Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP) Subgroup Gap Analysis. The Subgroup Gap Analysis is an additional report available for most PDP dashboards.
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This tutorial explores the basic functionality of the National Student Clearinghouse's Postsecondary Data Partnership subgroup gap analysis. The subgroup gap analysis is an additional report available for most PDP dashboards. This report helps identify achievement or equity gaps that may exist between student populations.
What do we mean by achievement gap? Let's say this represents our student cohort and we want to know if there is a difference in the percentage of students with Pell grants that met the credit threshold compared to the percentage of students without a Pell grant who met the credit threshold. We performed that calculation and find that 33.4% of first-year students with Pell grants met the credit threshold while 45.7% of first year students without a pilgram met the threshold. The difference in outcomes is called an equity gap. In this case, the difference is 12 percentage points.
Now let's use the Postsecondary Data Partnership subgroup gap analysis report to demonstrate how you can find these gaps. This is the credit accumulation rate dashboard. To access the subgroup gap analysis option, click on the drop-down menu and select subgroup gap analysis.
First let's explore the features. At the top, we find the same chart settings as the main dashboard. Clicking edit opens chart settings and allows you to set filters and apply dimensions. Below chart settings we will find any unique filters our dashboard might have. For the credit accumulation rate dashboard there are two unique filters: credit threshold and academic year.
Now we will use this report to answer a question: what is the gap in credit accumulation rate between students who are Pell grant recipients and students who are not recipients? To apply a dimension, click edit, which opens chart settings. Select Pell grant recipient from the dimension dropdown and click apply settings.
To the right we see the values of the Pell grant recipient metric. Because this report compares two student populations, it's waiting for you to select which populations. Let's select no, which means that students are not Pell grant recipients and yes which means students are Pell grant recipients.
Now we receive our gap analysis chart. Here, our Pell grant recipients are indicated by an orange marker while students who are not Pell grant recipients are indicated with a blue marker. On the left side we find our cohort years. The top row represents our 2017-18 cohort year, while the bottom row represents our most recent cohort year. Hovering over the 2017-18 data point for our Pell grant recipients, we find that 40% met the credit threshold of 15 credits earned for part-time first-year students and 30 credits earned for full-time first-year students in an academic year compared to 52.7% of that cohort who are not Pell grant recipients. That equity gap is nearly 13 percentage points. The gap for the 2018-19 cohort narrowed to 10 percentage points but widened to 12 percentage points in 2019-20. The gap stayed consistent at 12 percentage points in 2020-21, but both groups credit accumulation rate fell dramatically in 2021-22. Both groups had a rebound in their credit accumulation but those without Pell grants rebounded quicker which caused the equity gap to widen to 18 percentage points but by the most current reporting year that group's credited accumulation rate declined so that the gap dropped to 12 percentage points.
How will those gaps change if we filter our data to high academically achieving students? To add a filter, click on edit, which opens chart settings. Click GPA range and deselect "all", then click on "3.0 to 3.5", "3.5 to 4.0" and "4.0 to 4.5". Then click apply settings.
Now the students represented in this dashboard are high achieving students. As we see, the gap between those with Pell grants and those without Pell grants has narrowed significantly for every cohort year for our high academically achieving first-year students. The widest gap was 10 percentage points in 2020-21, but that narrowed to four percentage points by the most recent cohort.
Let's summarize what we learned. Through this exploration, we found that fewer Pell grant recipients meet the credit threshold of 15 credits earned for part-time first-year students and 30 credits earned for full-time first-year students compared to non- Pell grant recipients. While the gap changed over the cohorts reported, it was approximately 12 percentage points. However, among high academically achieving students the equity gap was significantly smaller.
Thank you for joining us.