What good is data if the people who need it most struggle to access and use it?
The National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) offers the most comprehensive source of verified postsecondary outcomes data in the country. Through tools like StudentTracker, they help state and district education leaders, school administrators, counselors and advisors, and teachers understand where their students go after graduation—and how they’re doing once they get there. Their secure, FERPA-compliant services support everything from equity-focused advising to statewide impact tracking, all with the goal of helping educators, policymakers, and researchers turn long-term student outcomes into smarter decisions.
And while getting this data is easier than it used to be, there’s still work to be done.
Before NSC made this information available to high schools, it lived entirely within postsecondary institutions’ closed ecosystems. That made it nearly impossible for counselors, principals, and district staff to evaluate postsecondary outcomes and determine whether their programs and processes were truly preparing students for success. At the state level, leaders lacked the clear, reliable postsecondary outcomes data they needed to inform policy, target funding, support district improvement efforts, and evaluate the effectiveness of programs across regions.
Today, while the data is more accessible, K-12 leaders still face real challenges in using it to drive decision-making. Student data has the potential to power everything from school counseling to strategic partnerships with communities—but only if educators can find, understand, and act on the insights it holds. Our client, a large family foundation, asked us to figure out what’s helping and what’s standing in the way of educators and administrators activating the full potential of student data.
Listening to the Field
At iF, we know the best way to gain understanding is by centering the voices of those with lived experience. To kick off this evaluation, we started by talking to the people actually doing the work. Through 39 interviews with educators, district- and state-level leaders, data product teams, intermediaries, and field experts, we mapped the experience of trying to use NSC data without external support. And to identify common pain points and gaps in support, we also surveyed district and school leaders across the country about the tools they use, the challenges they face, and the insights they’re trying to generate when working with postsecondary outcomes data.
What we heard was consistent:
- NSC data is incredibly valuable.
- NSC data is prohibitively difficult to use.
Common challenges to accessing and using this data included:
- Limited staff capacity, especially in rural or under-resourced districts.
- Manual and outdated data submission processes.
- Long delays between data submission and insight delivery.
- Limited real-time or role-specific reporting.
- Lack of interoperability and missing metrics (like employment outcomes).
Mapping the Market
Our research surfaced nine products that help practitioners access and make use of NSC data—each with its own approach to addressing these pain points. These included GuidEd Insight, Naviance, Overgrad, SchooLinks, Xello, Choices360, CoPilot, MaiaLearning, and Alumni Pathways.
To help education leaders better understand their options, we built two key resources for the field:
Field Guide to NSC-Connected Tools- A visual snapshot of the tools in this space, including their key capabilities, use cases, NSC integration status, and areas of differentiation. It’s built to give decision-makers a fast, functional overview of what’s out there and how each tool might serve their needs.
- A deeper dive into these products, sortable and filterable by feature set, intended user group, and more. It includes select product screenshots and added context around perceived ease of use, compliance with data standards, and equity considerations. The database lives in Airtable and is open to anyone with a free account.
Bringing Data to Life
After conducting thorough research, facilitating stakeholder interviews, surveying educators nationwide, and mapping tools on the market, we arrived at a shared foundation for smarter decision-making across the field. Using what we created, K-12 educators and administrators can now compare tools more easily, and practitioners have what they need to make the case for adopting the right one.
When data is hard to reach, it’s harder to act on. This work helped surface tools that bring clarity and access to those who rely on it.