The National Student Clearinghouse® helps education go further with innovative solutions that meet reporting, research, verification, transcript, and data exchange demands across the K-20 to workforce continuum. Their education verification and transcript ordering services are used by millions of students and alumni each year, and their services help institutions meet their growing compliance, administrative, student access, accountability, and analytical needs. NSC is also the nation’s largest provider of electronic student record exchanges and postsecondary transcript ordering services, utilized by 97% of the higher educational institutions in the USA.

As the largest provider of electronic student record exchanges, NSC faced several challenges in managing and governing its extensive learner data. Below are the key challenges that led them to seek a solution like Semarchy to improve data quality and governance:

Large volumes of poor-quality data 
NSC needed to deduplicate and consolidate over 150 million learner records from disparate sources to get consistent and accurate data across all channels.

Slow response times & fragmented data
With data stored in various systems, NSC struggled to respond quickly to customer needs, affecting operational efficiency and service quality.

Properly governing data & meeting compliance regulations
Maintaining governance over vast amounts of data, including sensitive Personally Identifiable Information (PII), was critical for NSC, especially with their compliance requirements under FERPA.

Protecting privacy & security
The migration of legacy data to a cloud-based system while ensuring security and compliance was a significant challenge for NSC, especially during the transition to remote operations.

To address these challenges, NSC selected Semarchy’s xDM platform for its flexible, scalable, and cloud-based solution to manage and govern learner data. The strategy focused on:

• Centralizing learner data: NSC implemented a unified data hub that consolidated data from multiple systems, providing a single, trusted source of truth for learner records, improving accuracy and consistency.
• Improving data governance & quality: With Semarchy’s MDM solution, NSC could define and enforce governance rules so that data across their entire landscape was accurate and complete.
• Enhanced customer support & compliance: The solution improved NSC’s ability to respond to customer requests quickly and accurately while complying with FERPA and other regulatory standards, especially in protecting PII.

After implementing Semarchy’s xDM platform, NSC achieved several key business outcomes:

• Increased data quality & efficiency: By consolidating and deduplicating learner 150+ million records, NSC improved data accuracy and reduced operational redundancies, leading to faster processing times and reduced data management costs.
• Improved customer service: With 99.9% uptime and streamlined access to accurate learner data, NSC enhanced its customer support services, providing quicker responses to students, alumni, and institutions.
• Enhanced data security & compliance: NSC successfully moved to a cloud-hosted platform while meeting strict PII governance, maintaining FERPA compliance, and proactively managing data security.
• Cost savings & reduced risks: By eliminating legacy systems and replacing them with a single, efficient platform, NSC reduced operational costs and mitigated financial, credit, and legal risks associated with data management.