National Student Clearinghouse: Degree Title Categories

I enjoy working with National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) return data, but the differences between the way schools report Degree Titles can be frustrating.  For example, here’s just a few of the ways “juris doctor” can appear:

a few ways JD can appear

I’ve worked on a few projects where it was necessary to work with the type of degree that was earned.  For example, as part of Access & Affordability discussions, it was important to examine the additional degrees that Swarthmore graduates earned after their Swarthmore graduation by student need level to determine if graduates in any particular need categories were earning certain degrees at higher/lower rates than other need categories.

example data_degree cat by need cat

 

In order to do this, I first had to recode degree titles into degree categories.

The NSC does make available some crosswalks, which can be found at https://nscresearchcenter.org/workingwithourdata/

The Credential_Level_Lookup_table can be useful for some projects.  However, my particular project required more detail than provided in the table (for example, Juris Doctors are listed as “Doctoral-Professional” and I needed to be able to separate out this degree), so I created my own syntax.

I’m sharing this syntax (below) as a starting point for your own projects. This is not a comprehensive list of every single degree title that has been submitted to the NSC, so be careful to always check to see what you need to add to the syntax.

While I have found this to be rarer, there are the occasional degrees that come through without a title in any of the records for that degree.  I’ve therefore also included a bit of syntax at the top that codes those with a Graduated=”Y” but a blank Degree Title to “unknown.”  If you are choosing to work with those records differently, you can comment out that syntax.

Once you have created your new degree categories variable(s), you can select one record per person and run against your institutional data.  One option is to keep, for those who have graduated, the highest degree earned.  You can use “Identify Duplicate Cases” to Define Matching Cases by ID and then Sort Within Matching Groups by  DegreeTitleCatShort (or any other degree title category variable you’ve created).  Be sure to select Ascending or Descending based on your project and whether you want the First or Last record in each group to be Primary.

Hope this helps you in your NSC projects!

SPSS syntax:  Degree Title Syntax to share v3

Video and SPSS Syntax: Deleting Select Cases Using the National Student Clearinghouse Individual Detail Return File

There may be some situations where you would want to delete select records from an individual return file. For example, you may have a project where you are looking at student enrollment after graduation or transfer, and it is decided that your particular project will only include records for which a student was enrolled for more than 30 days in a fall/spring term or more than 10 days in a summer term. Or, you may have six years of records for a particular cohort, but you only want to examine records for four years. In both of these cases, you would want to delete the records that don’t fit your criteria before analyzing your data.

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Video and SPSS Syntax: Admit/Not Enroll Project Using the National Student Clearinghouse Individual Detail Return File

Irish United Nations Veterans Association house and memorial garden (Arbour Hill)” by Infomatique is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

I use the National Student Clearinghouse individual detail return file and SPSS syntax in this video to capture the first school attended for students who were admitted to my institution, but who did not enroll (names listed are not real applicants). In a future video, I’ll work on the same project using the aggregate report. I almost always use the individual detail return file since it provides so much information, but it does have a limitation that impacts this project.

Continue reading Video and SPSS Syntax: Admit/Not Enroll Project Using the National Student Clearinghouse Individual Detail Return File

Decisions, Decisions

I’ve been working with data from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) for a while now. A lot of wonderful information can be found in the NSC data, but the detailed return file can sometimes be a bit difficult. There are so many ways the data can be sliced, and it can sometimes be challenging to determine how best to work with the data to present meaningful information to stakeholders.

Continue reading Decisions, Decisions