The Gardner Institute offers, as a part of our major services (Gateways to Completion, Retention Performance Management, Foundations of Excellence, Academies and Communities), specific lenses of analysis into institutional data. These lenses focus on historically ignored equity gaps through metrics including DFWI and graduation rates. These views are presented to partner institutions via a web-based interface to which anyone at the institution may be allowed access. We refer to this approach as a transparent data democracy, designed to dissolve silos of perception, enabling high-quality strategic planning.

As part of our ongoing efforts to support such equity-minded, democratized decisions using student data, the Gardner Institute has added the Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP) standards as a way to streamline data intake. The PDP is a product of National Student Clearinghouse.

The Gardner Institute strongly encourages every postsecondary institution in the United States to consider engaging with the Post Secondary Data Partnership. PDP enables institutions to contextualize student success with the context of peer institutions, including those across state boundaries. Whether you’re currently working with the Gardner Institute, exploring potential collaborations with us, or simply want profound insights into student trends, here are some of the many reasons engaging with the PDP makes sense:

Why join the PDP?

Gain access to richer insights. PDP insights are based on a comprehensive set of student data, including information left out of other data collections. The PDP’s data includes metrics on all new students who enter your institution at any time, not just full-time fall freshmen.
Grow student success and close equity gaps. The PDP’s early momentum indicators enable you to identify students who need help so that your institution can intervene earlier to help them get back on track.
Tell your institution’s story. PDP tools help you create visually compelling, easily understood reports that communicate trends and outcomes for your entire student body and specific populations within it.
Save time and resources. The PDP reduces your reporting burden and cost by enabling you to submit data just once to report to many education organizations that your institution identifies to the Clearinghouse.

The PDP gives you:

Interactive dashboards that empower you to easily measure outcomes.
Powerful filtering tools for your institution’s deep, disaggregated data to enable comprehensive assessments of your students’ outcomes by cohort, cohort term, age, race, gender, Pell Grant* status, GPA, first-generation-student status, and more.
Simpler reporting to third-party education organizations.
An analysis-ready file that lets you perform granular analysis and data comparison with other data sets.
Benchmarking data for comparisons with peer institutions.

For institutions that use Ellucian products, they have simplified the data submission process for the Postsecondary Data Partnership if your product is Ethos-enabled.