To Members of the Powered by Publics Community,

We invite you to submit your CDM data to help us measure progress we have made toward our degree completion and equity goals. When we launched the initiative five years ago, we committed to collecting data through 2025. Our Data Advisory Task Force developed the Core Data Metrics, a low-effort, high-value data collection that tracks 8 key student performance measures, disaggregated by 15 subgroups. We have 4 years of data and will now collect year 5.

This year’s Core Data Metrics collection will be open from March 11 through June 30, 2024. All Powered by Publics member institutions are invited to submit data. To prepare for this year’s collection, we recommend the following steps:

1. Confirm your CDM Main Contact. Prior-year contacts will still have access to the portal. If you need to add a new contact, please complete this form.
2. One-on-one support calls may be scheduled with our team upon request at CDM@aplu.org.
3. Submit your institution’s data (16 files) before June 30, 2024. If you need additional time for this submission, please send a request to CDM@aplu.org.

The information you need for the submission can be found at our website: http://www.aplu.org/cdm. The site includes detailed guidance for data submission, a data dictionary, the template for the Annual Metrics file, an FAQ document, and access to the data portal.

Note that there are 16 total files to submit. All institutions are expected to process student cohort data through the National Student Clearinghouse and submit the institutional cohort query reports (NSC-generated) to the portal along with the annual metrics (APLU-provided) template which contains enrollment, retention, and degree data.

For those institutions that participate in the Student Achievement Measure (SAM), this process is integrated with SAM so that data submitted to CDM will automatically flow into SAM. The datasets will also be accessible to Powered by Publics members through our VSA Analytics platform to allow for custom visualization and benchmarking. Institutions that are actively participating in the Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP) may grant access to APLU to use those data to populate the CDM collection. Please reach out to us at CDM@aplu.org if your institution is a PDP participant and would like to consider using the PDP data for the CDM submission.

If you have questions or feedback, please feel free to reach out to us at cdm@aplu.org.