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15 Years of Insights from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center
For 15 years, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center has been a vital source of data-driven insights into the ever-evolving landscape of higher education. From tracking enrollment trends during critical periods, like the global pandemic, to illuminating the pathways of non-traditional students, the Research Center has consistently provided a clearer understanding of how students navigate their educational journeys and achieve success.
To delve deeper into the impact and future of the Research Center, we spoke with its Executive Director, Doug Shapiro, whose passion for leveraging data to improve higher education shines through as he reflects on the center’s origins, evolution, and future.
Doug, you’ve been at the Research Center since its inception. Can you tell us about your start?
When I first heard about this opportunity, it struck me immediately as one of those jobs I had been preparing for almost my whole life without even knowing it. I had been doing a lot of work with student data and research into higher education at the institutional and state levels for years. So, I knew the power of the Clearinghouse’s detailed data to expand our understanding of how higher education works and for whom it works.
What stands out about the early days of the Research Center?
We were a small shop in those days, and it was very exciting. We had so much that we wanted to convey about the potential in the data that the Clearinghouse had been collecting, at that time, for almost 17 years. This was the first time that we had reached a critical mass of data that enabled us to say something nationally and comprehensively, on a research basis, and shed light on the full range of student outcomes.
We felt this was a vastly important mission to help schools, colleges, and policymakers improve education so that students could do better and succeed more.
What was the Research Center’s first report?
Our first national report was a look at changes in student enrollment during the years of the Great Recession. This came out in 2011. That recession generated one of the most significant surges in student enrollment, particularly older student enrollment. We were able to track that and report on how it affected different types of students, ages, genders, regions of the country, and other types of institutions.
How has the Research Center evolved over the past 15 years?
The Research Center was created to support the mission of the National Student Clearinghouse, which hasn’t changed. The Research Center serves that mission by conducting and supporting objective research on educational access, progression, and success for students, schools, and the public.
Initially, we wanted to focus on how the data could reveal new perspectives on student pathways that you could not see anywhere else, particularly for non-traditional students who weren’t covered by a lot of the typical government metrics, and the students and pathways that were so often overlooked by them.
We wanted to create new metrics that went beyond the standard ones and would fully reflect the range of paths that students are traversing to succeed. These pathways included things like transfers, stopouts, and returning after spending time in the workforce to continue your degree, which led to extended times to earn a degree that no one had ever tracked before. At the time, most schools treated students who left after a year or two as dropouts or failures. The schools had no idea if these students had transferred or maybe returned and completed elsewhere. We wanted everything that we published to highlight that broader and much more inclusive view of who was being served and who wasn’t being served by the education community.
That is the unique power of the Clearinghouse data. Its timeliness, its level of detail, and its near-universal coverage.
How have the Research Center reports changed?
As the Research Center became more established over the years, we demonstrated our value, quality, and reach to the education community, who now rely on us. So we’re more focused on maintaining that value by providing consistent trends over time that schools and organizations know they can depend on year after year. Using our reports, they can identify areas for improvement, benchmark their progress, and more. If you look at our reports, you can see that kind of transition over time, from just highlighting the views you could never see before to the regular reporting of trends that track these new views.
How do you decide what topics to cover?
We’ve always focused on questions that we know are important to the field and that can be uniquely answered using Clearinghouse data. The Research Center also has its own board of directors who provide advice and perspective from all across the education field. Our board members come from colleges and universities, secondary education, and nonprofit organizations. The Research Center board also includes people with expertise in policy who help ensure that we think about the right kinds of questions, those that are going to bring value not only to institutions but to students, states, and policymakers.
What’s next for the Research Center?
First, we will continue to produce all the important publication series that have led us to this point. We are committed to continuing to meet the needs of our audiences with the research they have come to rely on, what’s now considered critical data that schools don’t want to be without. Our reports help them understand trends in the field, what’s happening, where students are, where they’re heading, and how students’ goals are changing.
However, we must also continue to grow and evolve our metrics and reports as the education system evolves and the needs and aspirations of students change. We can’t just keep tracking them using the same metrics. For example, right now, we’re working on ways to measure student outcomes beyond just degree completion and into areas like employment, careers, and earnings. That’s an important new area for us because students and policymakers are increasingly focused on value and return on investment as indicators of educational success. It’s not enough to just get a degree. It’s also important to get a job in your field related to your degree that’s pays you a sustainable wage. So that area of interest will only grow, and we will undoubtedly evolve with it.
How will AI affect your work?
It’ll help us generate reports more quickly and reliably, and help our analysts be more productive. I also hope it can help us identify new trends within the data that we might not have noticed. However, there are still a lot of questions and potential risks and unknowns about the answers or trends it identifies. We must be cautious about possible biases that can creep into unexamined looks at extensive data like ours, but it’s an exciting prospect.
“We wanted to create new metrics that went beyond the standard ones and would fully reflect the range of paths students were traversing to succeed … That is the unique power of the Clearinghouse data. Its timeliness, its level of detail, and its near-universal coverage.”
Doug Shapiro
Executive Director, National Student Clearinghouse Research Center
