Case Study: National Student Clearinghouse achieves a trusted single source of learner data and robust governance with Semarchy xDM

Tackling the challenges of governance, master data and data quality

National Student Clearinghouse (NSC), the nation’s largest provider of electronic student record exchanges and postsecondary transcript ordering (used by 97% of U.S. higher education institutions), faced modernizing an aging legacy system that held sensitive PII and roughly 150 million "golden" learner records. NSC needed a master data management (MDM) platform to improve data quality, governance, and response times while maintaining 99.9% uptime and uninterrupted customer service during a cloud migration that began at the start of the COVID pandemic. To meet these challenges they engaged Semarchy and its xDM platform.

Semarchy implemented a modular xDM-based solution with standard SQL architecture, virtual training (staff fully trained in five days), and custom governance workflows while enabling a cloud-hosted deployment with on-prem connectivity. Using Semarchy, NSC consolidated and deduplicated massive data volumes into a single trusted hub (addressing ~150 million records), reduced thousands of legacy comparison notes to about 25 match rules, eliminated operational redundancy, maintained 99.9% uptime, strengthened PII/FERPA protections, and lowered fraud, compliance and operational costs while improving customer support and data-driven agility.

National Student Clearinghouse

Felicia Perez

Managing Director, Information as a Product Program