News & Updates
The Postsecondary Partnership, or PDP, is a powerful data system developed by the National Student Clearinghouse that helps institutions analyze student success by providing detailed, interactive dashboards and comprehensive student-level data. It has been a key resource for colleges to measure student success outcomes improvement and facilitate institution-wide alignment and learning.
Widespread adoption of the PDP, however, has been challenged by several factors related to ease of use and consistency of cohort definitions across different data dashboards and files. In response, with funding from the Gates Foundation, ATD has been working on the development of a suite of new data tools and resources in collaboration with the Community College Research Center (CCRC) and ResearchEd.
These tools and resources allow users to better understand student experiences using data from both the generic dashboards and the analysis ready (AR) files that contain rich, student-level data. These tools represent a significant step forward in the utility of the PDP, especially for smaller colleges with less robust IR office resources.
ATD’s Susan Mayer, chief learning officer, and Lisa Stich, director of data partnerships, recently presented on these new data tools and resources at ATD’s 2025 Data & Analytics Summit, with a focus on how they can be used to advance student transfer success. After the summit, ATD sat down with Mayer and Stich to discuss these new tools, why they are excited about them, and how colleges can use them to advance change.
Q: What can you tell us about the recently built tools?
Lisa: We wanted to help users take advantage of the power of the analysis-ready (AR) files and to make it as easy as possible to use them. So, we worked on building two new AR file tools that allow PDP users to create key data visualizations through a simple copy and paste and auto-population process. Each tool comes with an accompanying user guide.
The first of these tools is the Student Journey Explorer, which will be released in late 2025 or early 2026. This allows users to examine the data for a specific population cohort across their journey from enrollment through completion/transfer. This enables colleges to identify where students are making good progress or where they are facing barriers that cause them to lose momentum on their way to earning a credential. So, it also allows colleges to track the impact of different strategies and interventions for different student populations. Practitioners are able to dive deeply into gateway course completion data, a key leading indicator of longer-term retention and completion. The data can be filtered in several ways to inform design or redesign of instructional strategies and academic interventions to help more students complete these key foundational courses.
The second tool is the Momentum Data Explorer, which is available now. This tool provides additional insights in four important categories: early momentum, top-enrolled courses, program enrollments, and transfer outcomes. Each of these data categories can be filtered in multiple ways to understand more completely the factors that impact the student experience. For example, the data on top-enrolled courses can be disaggregated over time by course modality to understand the extent to which changes in enrollment patterns contribute to changes in course performance rates, thereby enabling data-informed discussions about instructional strategy redesign, high-impact practice implementation, and professional learning opportunities for faculty teaching these courses. This tool was built with the Community College Research Center and incorporates their Unpacking Program Enrollments with Equity in Mind tool that facilitates evidence-based discussions of outcomes disaggregated by program of study.
Susan: The third tool, which is really more a resource than a tool, is the Guide to Leveraging Transfer Success with the PDP. Like the Student Journey Explorer, this one is in the final stages of development. It provides guidance on how to use data from the PDP on transfer outcomes for those students who transferred to another institution to earn a baccalaureate degree. The resource equips colleges to identify students who transferred, transfer destinations, whether they transferred with a credential, and the extent to which they earned a bachelor-level credential. Colleges can combine this information with the cohort-specific data in the Student Journey Explorer to better understand the credit accumulation and course-taking patterns that contribute to successful transfer outcomes. This data, in turn, can be used to strengthen academic and career pathways, curriculum, student support strategies, and partnerships with other higher education institutions, especially most popular transfer destinations. It is a useful resource to support implementing the recommendations in the newly released and revised Transfer Playbook published by the Community College Research Center and the Aspen Institute.
Lisa: The final tool — also a resource — is an inquiry guide to using the PDP dashboards. This guide responds to requests from participants in the PDP Data Discovery course who were looking for a comprehensive reference guide — not only on how to use the dashboards but also on how each dashboard can be used for inquiry to advance understanding of the student experience.
Q: What’s most exciting about these new tools and resources?
Lisa: The PDP dashboards are a great way to begin to expand institutional understanding of different student experiences — identifying who is succeeding and who is not — to support strong data sensemaking and action. But they only scratch the surface of the information practitioners need to develop effective strategies that improve student outcomes equitably. These new tools, individually and in combination, allow college teams to explore additional intersectional data more deeply and consistently and to contextualize their data analyses to specific cohorts of students.
Q: Can you give us an example of how a college might use these new tools?
Susan: Sure, let’s take the issue of transfer. More than 70% of community college students tell us they intend to complete bachelor’s degrees, most by transferring to a baccalaureate-awarding institution. However, only 30% of students actually transfer, and only about half of them complete a baccalaureate degree within six years. These numbers have been flat for the past 10 years, and the Transfer Tracker data released recently by the National Student Clearinghouse highlights the significant disparities in successful transfer outcomes among different student populations.
Colleges, of course, are committed to improving transfer outcomes but historically have been challenged to understand which students are transferring, where they are going, and whether they earn a subsequent credential.
Lisa: Using the Student Journey Explorer, the college can explore the community college experience for those same students, asking questions like, “Do students enrolled in specific programs of study transfer at higher rates than others?” or “Do students who complete their gateway courses in their first year transfer at higher rates?” or “Do students who transfer to certain institutions achieve stronger outcomes than those who transfer elsewhere?”
Answers to these gating questions can then lead to further exploration of quantitative and qualitative information, such as identifying the extent to which a student met with an advisor to map out their educational journey before enrolling in courses, or enrolled in courses where high-impact instructional strategies were used, or engaged with academic and/or non-academic supports at different stages in their journeys. This sensemaking process, which illuminates how different students are experiencing college, enables teams in academic and student affairs to design or redesign structures, policies, and processes to better support more students onto and through pathways to economic and social mobility.
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Explore the PDP page of ATD’s website for more information about the newly released tools and check back later in the year to learn about the tools coming soon.