More Than Spreadsheets: Revitalizing Data Systems to Spark New Conversations and Better Outcomes

Every spring, over ten thousand students graduate from high schools across the Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) in North Carolina, and walk into a wide range of futures. Some head straight to four-year universities, while others enroll at the local community college. Some take a gap year, enter the workforce, or pursue a credential on a timeline that doesn't fit neatly into any standard report. For years, WCPSS, one of the 15 largest districts in the nation, had limited visibility into what happened next, but not because the data didn't exist. In fact, between national datasets and data collected by the district, WCPSS had access to an information overload. 

Tim Carroll, a Cohort 15 SDP Fellow placed at WCPSS, led the effort to find out what was hiding in the district's records and helped to build something lasting from what he and his colleagues found. 

An abundance of inaccessible data 

For nearly two decades, WCPSS had been receiving data from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC). Enrollment records, persistence indicators, completion data, and more were all there, stretching back to the graduating class of 2006. However, the district had relied primarily on NSC-generated snapshot reports, which were useful at a glance, but didn't help answer strategic questions. The reports were static, inflexible, and silent on critical outcomes like transfer rates or time to degree. 

The result was a familiar frustration in education data work: a warehouse full of valuable information, largely inaccessible to the people who needed it most. 

Carroll's capstone project took on the challenge directly. The goal was to transform nearly 20 years of overlapping, messy NSC files into a living, flexible system in order to understand where WCPSS graduates go, what they achieve, and where the system might be falling short. 

Building a new system, with care 

The first challenge was purely technical. Many overlapping NSC data files with redundant (though not necessarily identical) records, the distinct calendar conventions of different colleges, and other data quirks, needed to be turned into a single, clean, student-level outcomes file. Carroll describes his approach: "My first step was to combine these files and identify substantive duplication to create a comprehensive set of college enrollment and completion records for each district graduate. From there, I flagged key postsecondary milestones including first enrollment, retention, transfer, completion of any credential, and completion of a bachelor's degree, with attention to the timing of these milestones." He supplemented NSC data with district records and external sources, ultimately producing "a single unified record of college enrollment and completion for each graduate, with the ability to easily create extracts or merge in additional data to meet the needs of various audiences across the district." 

That meant making a number of careful decisions: How do you define an academic year consistently across hundreds of colleges with different calendars? How do you identify a transfer without overcounting or missing the students who truly made that leap? How do you preserve information about where a student first enrolled when they later moved to a different campus or institution? 

But these aren't just technical questions. Each decision involved tradeoffs, and those tradeoffs shaped what the data could and couldn't say. The guiding principle became what might be called acceptable fuzziness, a term that has come to mean making transparent, consistent rules while being honest about the edge cases that won't be captured perfectly. 

The pipeline was also built with longevity in mind. When new NSC waves arrive, the system can now incorporate them in minutes, maintaining consistent measurement across all years. This kind of sustainability matters when analyst capacity is limited and institutional knowledge tends to walk out the door. 

Building a sustainable system 

Once the pipeline was running, the findings were striking. 

Overall college enrollment had declined slightly over the nearly 20-year period, with a notable shift toward two-year colleges. Overall credential attainment remained flat, with just over half of each WCPSS graduating class completing a college degree or certificate within six years of high school. Transfer rates from two-year to four-year colleges remained low, but among students who did successfully transfer, bachelor's degree completion rose substantially, outpacing the growth in the completion rate of students who started at four-year institutions. As Carroll notes, "while navigating the transfer pathway is still challenging, the outlook for students who do successfully transfer has greatly improved." It's one of the more encouraging trends buried in the data and a bright spot that snapshot reports would never have been able to surface. 

The picture for four-year colleges was generally strong: completion rates of 75–95% for most top destinations. Carroll found this particularly encouraging: "it was heartening to see that North Carolina offers WCPSS graduates such a wide variety of good options—large and small, near and far, with different missions and areas of academic focus." The picture for two-year colleges is considerably more mixed. Completion rates fall below 50% across nearly every two-year destination (consistent with nationwide trends), including the large local community college that enrolls more WCPSS graduates than any other institution, yet graduates fewer than 40% of them. 

Carroll is careful to note that two-year colleges generally serve students from a wider range of academic backgrounds with many different academic and career goals, and do so on a tight budget while keeping cost barriers low. However, the NSC data shows that the gaps in completion rates for WCPSS students can't be explained away entirely by differences in student background. "Completion rates were lower for students who started at two-year colleges than for students who started at four-year colleges, even after accounting for differences in academic or financial background," he explains. "The patterns I saw reinforce the idea that two-year college pathways, especially transfer pathways, are not the 'easy' option but in fact present their own set of challenges requiring careful planning and navigation in addition to skills necessary for success at both two-year and four-year colleges." He points to promising initiatives—including the NC Community Colleges' Boost pilot program and guaranteed transfer programs within the UNC System—while emphasizing the need for early guidance and "increased collaboration across the K12 and postsecondary sectors." 

Disparities run deep. Six-year college attainment ranges from about 30% to 75% across WCPSS high schools. Students from more affluent neighborhoods earn degrees or certificates at more than double the rate of peers from higher-poverty areas. Gaps by race and gender are substantial and persistent but now, for the first time, the district has the infrastructure to track and communicate them clearly, which can hopefully lead to improvement. 

Making data actionable 

Producing the data was only half the work. A report sitting on a shared drive helps no one. Making the findings useful required active dissemination: a district-wide internal report covering trends, top college destinations, and disparities; school-specific data packets tailored to each high school's graduates; and site visits where Carroll and colleagues presented findings directly to administrators and counseling staff. 

A second report followed, adding time-to-degree analysis and disaggregating outcomes for additional student groups including Career and Technical Education (CTE) concentrators (who, the data revealed, enroll in and complete college at higher rates than the district average). The team also worked to build partnerships that would outlast any single project, most notably launching a data-sharing agreement with the local community college to access richer information than the NSC provides alone. When staff from the Department of Counseling and Student Services collaborated on a counselor focus group, something important surfaced: school counselors wanted more structured training on using postsecondary data in their advising work, and they were ready to engage. Carroll heard "a lot of enthusiasm for tailored data reflecting outcomes specific to each school's graduates, not just high-level data aggregating districtwide outcomes"—a finding that directly shaped how the team structured their products and outreach, including school-specific supplements and direct meetings with counseling staff. 

Carroll's work offers a roadmap for districts sitting on similar data backlogs. The first step isn't a dashboard or a report, it's building the infrastructure that makes good analysis repeatable. That means documented code, clear decision rules, and a consolidated file that future analysts can actually use. Carroll's contributions as an SDP Fellow were central to getting that foundation in place. Looking ahead, the success of this continued work will depend on continued strong relationships and partnerships across the district. 

It also means accepting that getting information to people can be as hard as building it. Data socialization takes time, relationship-building, and persistence. 

Budget realities intervened before every planned phase could be completed. The dedicated analyst position was cut, and some student-facing tools remain on hold. But the pipeline, the data file, and the documentation are there, which is a foundation the district can build on when capacity returns. And thanks to the work of Carroll and his WCPSS colleagues, the district is now far better equipped to understand and support the journeys that come next.