This practice brief provides six recommendations for college and university staff to create or update data collection and reporting capacities for students with incarceration histories.

At present, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) does not require institutions to report student data with an incarceration indicator. This means that national enrollment, completion, time-to-credential, and related success metrics for incarcerated students are unknown in the aggregate. Consequently, the rapid growth of enrollment among students with incarceration histories is happening without a baseline understanding of who students are, where they are located, what programs of study they are pursuing, and how they are faring in those pathways. The practice brief aims to assist college and university staff in taking stock of current data collection and reporting practices and initiating intentional processes of incorporating this population of students into critical data infrastructure.

Recommendations for this brief were derived from a national qualitative study that examined if and how colleges and universities collect and report information on incarcerated students. In 2024, data was collected from 11 institutions of higher education that were enrolling incarcerated students and participated in the 2022 National Cohort Program facilitated by the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison.

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Acknowledgements 

Partial funding support for this research was provided by Ascendium Education Group through the collaboration between the Research Collaborative on Higher Education in Prison and the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison in support of the Landscape of Higher Education in Prison Project.