Adult Education Administrator's Manual

Instructional Services
Transitions

Transitions

The National Reporting System (NRS) includes four outcome measures after they leave the program: entered employment, retained employment, entered postsecondary education and obtained a secondary credential (adult high school diploma or pass the GED tests). Programs must collect these measures only fro students who designate these outcomes as one of their goals for attending the program. The definitions for the four outcome measures are:

• Entered employment—Learners who obtain a job by the end of the first quarter after exit quarter.
• Retained employment—Learners who remained employed in the third quarter after program exit.
• Entered postsecondary education—Learners enrolling in a postsecondary educational or occupational skills program building on prior services or training received.
• Receipt of adult high school diploma or GED—Learners who obtain a GED, secondary school diploma or recognized equivalent.

The NRS requires that you contact students with employment goals during the first quarter after they exit and, if they obtain employment, again two quarters later. Many states use data matching to collect follow-up measures, especially employment measures. Data matching links records from the program data base to another database that has the needed information on the same people. For example, using Social Security numbers, student records from a program can be matched to the state unemployment insurance wage database to determine whether students are employed and have retained employment. Data matching is a technical process that requires your data system to produce specific data in a required format. To conduct this process, each student to be matched needs a valid Social Security number.

Excerpted from “The National Reporting System for Adult Education Guide for Improving NRS Data Quality: Procedures for Data Collection and Training”; August 2002; 49; 54. (PDF) (Retrieved from NRS website May 29, 2007)

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