College Going Toolkit and Resources

Access the college going components of the Toolkit for Effective Data Use for Stata and for R, SDP's Strategic Performance Indicators for College Going, and resources related to summer melt.

Getting Started

Identify essential data elements for analyzing student achievement.

SDP Data Specification Guide: Successful data analysis begins with proper identification of data elements necessary to answer key questions of interest.

Clean, check, and build variables for your data set.

College Going Data Cleaning Tasks: Upon collecting essential data elements you must ensure that the data can be reliably used in future analyses.

Connect relevant data sets from different sources.

College Going Linking Guide: Now that you've collected data and cleaned your data, you must merge the files together to create an analysis file.

Analyze your data sets.

SDP Code for Analysis: The final step in the SDP Toolkit for Effective Data Use is to analyze the data you've identified, cleaned, and connected.

Adopt best practices to facilitate shared and replicable data analysis.

SDP Coding Style Guide: To ensure that statistical code is easily shared across a team and is replicable by future users, SDP and CEPR recommend that you follow best coding, programming, and data management practices.

 

Calculate College Going Pathways in Stata

Attainment Along the Education Pipeline

Summarize student attainment from ninth grade through college using three milestones: 1) on-time high school completion, 2) seamless college transition, and 3) persistence to the second year of college.

Download Stata Code | Download Data | Go to Repository | View Guide

On-Track in Ninth Grade

Examine patterns of student retention and on-time transitions from ninth to tenth grade. This information can provide an early warning about students at risk of dropping out who might benefit from early, targeted support.

Download Stata Code | Download Data | Go to Repository | View Guide

High School Graduation

Examine trends and variations in high school completion rates across schools and student subgroups. These analyses reveal the extent to which schools may differentially influence student trajectories towards completion.

Download Code | Download Data | Go to Repository | View Guide

College Enrollment

Calculate college-going rates across high schools, comparing outcomes for similar students attending different high schools. Examine whether high school graduates enroll in colleges and universities well-matched to their academic qualifications. 

Download Code |  Download Data | Go to Repository | View Guide

Calculate College Going Pathways in R

Attainment Along the Education Pipeline

Summarize student attainment from ninth grade through college using three milestones: 1) on-time high school completion, 2) seamless college transition, and 3) persistence to the second year of college. 

Download Code| Download Data | Go to Repository | View Guide

On-Track in Ninth Grade

Examine patterns of student retention and on-time transitions from ninth to tenth grade. This information can provide an early warning about students at risk of dropping out who might benefit from targeted support. 

Download Code| Download Data | Go to Repository | View Guide

High School Graduation

Examine trends and variations in high school completion rates across schools and student subgroups and reveal the extent to which high schools may differentially influence student trajectories towards completion. 

Download Code| Download Data | Go to Repository | View Guide

College Enrollment

Highlight college-going rates across high schools, comparing outcomes for similar students attending different high schools. Examine whether high school graduates enroll in colleges and universities well-matched to their academic qualifications.

Download Code |  Download Data | Go to Repository | View Guide

College Going Indicators

Strategic Performance Indicators (SPIs) are measures that reveal policy and management levers that have the potential to improve student outcomes. SPIs are derived from the SDP Diagnostics, rigorous descriptive analyses that SDP performs on a common set of issues using existing data from partnering education agencies. SDP’s goal is that education agencies will adopt these SPIs, thereby creating benchmarking information to understand their success in working toward key outcomes over time.

Off-Track Status in High School

Focuses on identifying at-risk students in ninth grade, while there is still plenty of time to improve students' chances of timely high school graduation.

Infographic Summary | Memo

High School Effect on College Going

Highlights variation in college-going rates for students with similar achievement. Helps identify schools that are meaningfully influencing the likelihood of college enrollment. 

Infographic Summary | Memo

College Choice

Reveals that many highly prepared students opt to attend less selective postsecondary institutions or do not attend college at all directly out of high school. 

Infographic Summary | Memo

Summer Melt Tools

Across the country, 10–40% of seemingly college-intending students, particularly those from low-income backgrounds, fail to enroll in college the fall after graduation. This phenomenon is known as summer melt. College-intending students have completed key college-going steps, such as being accepted to college and applying for financial aid, and have concretely signaled their intention to enroll in college. A student has melted if he or she was college-intending, and yet still fails to transition successfully to college the fall after high school graduation. Summer melt is a prevalent issue for education leaders because large shares of students are failing to bridge that gap between institutions. Yet research has identified interventions that can have a significant impact on alleviating the summer melt phenomenon and increasing college enrollment rates. Moreover, it is possible to do so at a relatively low cost.

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