Learn what a search date is and the best dates for each of the StudentTracker queries.
For the best coverage of fall enrollment information, you’ll likely want to wait to run your query until mid-November, and for spring enrollments, mid-April. This is a tip for WHEN to submit your query files, not the Search Date.
This session is intended for post-secondary institutions active with StudentTracker for Colleges & Universities.
Resources
Transcript
For each query, when you put students in the file, you are going to also give us something called a search date and the search date defines the window that you would like to see records for. For example, if you put in a search date of January 1, 2018, for a subsequent enrollment query, you are then going to get records that are on or after January 1st of 2018. So you're able to very clearly narrow down the window of the records that you do and don't want. The number of students and the number of files is unlimited. When you are submitting these request files, we do encourage folks to submit varying versions with different search dates just so that you can see how the search date works, what type of information you're getting back and make sure that you're using the appropriate search date to give you the data that you desire. So for example, if you're doing a query on Rita and Emily, my colleagues, and you put for Rita a search date of January 2000, we're going to give you back records we have for Rita from January 2000 up through today. However, if you also put Emily in that file and you give her a search date of 2014, we're going to give you records on Emily from 2014 through today. Rita has a different search date than Emily. That is permissible in all of the query types except for the cohort query. Because that is a group of like students who are moving through essentially a program together, their search dates must all be identical.
For the cohort query, a lot of times the search date is going to be the beginning of the fall or spring term.
For the declined or denied admissions, that's going to be the date when the student would have started at your institution had they attended. Because you are looking to get the behavior of students who applied to your school but did not attend, we recommend that you use the search date of when your term would have begun. So for a fall semester that would be say August 25th or so. Any enrollment term with a term end date that is after that August 27th date will be returned for that student. So if you happen to have schools in your area where their fall terms start earlier and you're thinking that perhaps August 27th is a little bit late, you could certainly back that up a little bit maybe August 10th or 15th just to see if you're getting the information you want.
For the prior attendance, that also is going to be the start date of the term that they would have began at your institution and that again is looking backwards.
And then finally, for subsequent enrollment, when you're determining the search date it's very much dependent upon what kind of information you're trying to get. So if you are looking for concurrent enrollment, you want to have a search date that is during the student's time or tenure at your institution. So that you can see in addition to my school where else is the student attending. If you're using it for subsequent enrollment or transfer behavior, your search date would be the day that they left your institution. We would then look forward to see after that date where else did the student attend.
We do have free guides available on our website. So if you have some questions about the queries and how they work and/or the reports that you get back in the data that's in them, I would encourage you to go online and access our free guides and see if the information that you need is there.