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Add a metric, revise one, or retire one.
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What this is
This is a measurement architecture for learning mobility: what a learner has already learned, wherever they learned it, counting toward what they are trying to reach.
Every metric on the list was checked against published sources first. Where a reputable organization already publishes a commensurate metric, we used that organization's term and definition. If we have yet to find something published, the metric is written fresh and says so.
Every metric names one lead component, plus any other components it touches. Every metric also names the ways it should be broken out when it is reported, using the two standard taxonomies below and any cuts particular to that metric. Outcome and earnings metrics carry learning mobility cuts as well, so the same metric can be read two ways: for learners who had prior learning recognized, and for learners who did not. Tier 2 and Tier 3 are ordered by lead component, and within each component by the order in which the work happens.
The tiering test
The metric records something the learner attained: a course or credential completed, a milestone reached, a progression achieved, a skill demonstrated and recognized, an economic result realized. Includes non-attainment states, because stopping out without a credential is an outcome.
The metric records something about the learner's preparation, behavior, participation, choice or social conditions that predicts a Tier 1 outcome, and is not itself an attainment.
The metric records a property of the system rather than of the learner: supply and access, institutional capacity, funding, labor market conditions, and the data infrastructure that makes the other two tiers measurable.
The eight components
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The two standard taxonomies
Two taxonomies are standard, and are defined once here rather than repeated in every row. Dimensions particular to a single metric are listed on that metric.
Race and ethnicity; income background, with Pell receipt an acceptable proxy; gender; rural or urban; US state or territory. Applied to every learner-denominated metric.
Higher education, subdivided into two-year, four-year and graduate school, and each of those further into public, private not-for-profit and private for-profit; license provider; employer; third-party training. Applied to every metric where the provider is a meaningful unit.
Learning provider type records which kinds of provider a metric encompasses. The learning provider dimension records how the metric should be cut when it is reported.
The six learning mobility cuts
We slice outcome and earnings metrics by the learning mobility components inside them. Six standard cuts are defined.
CAEL and WICHE found a 49 percent credential completion rate among adult learners with prior learning credit against 27 percent among those without, and a regression-adjusted completion likelihood more than 17 percent higher. 72 institutions, roughly 238,000 adult learners (The PLA Boost, revised December 2020).
Which source wins
When two organizations define the same thing differently, we do not average them and we do not decide metric by metric.
Where the Education-to-Workforce Framework and the National Student Clearinghouse define the same thing, we use the Education-to-Workforce definition. For newer material, we use the definition from the organization that has published one over one that has not. For the items flagged LC, we use the LEARN Commission's report.
We never delete the definition we did not choose. It stays in the registry, marked subordinate, because the gap between two definitions is itself information. Three worked cases show what the rule costs:
The definitions differ in denominator. E-W counts all first-year college students; NSC counts only students required to complete a gateway course. Taking E-W widens the denominator and will lower reported rates relative to PDP dashboards. State the difference whenever both are shown.
E-W attaches a window of 150 percent of program length where NSC fixes the second academic year. NSC also splits the idea into two named metrics, retention at your own institution and persistence anywhere, where E-W folds both into one. We keep NSC's retention, because it is anchored to the institution where E-W is anchored to the learner, and the gap between the two is itself a mobility signal.
Substantively aligned: NSC's default thresholds of 30 full-time and 15 part-time match E-W exactly. Here the choice is a naming decision rather than a measurement change.
Ordering and metric IDs
Tier 1 runs in ladder order, from secondary attainment through economic return. Tier 2 and Tier 3 run in component order, C1 through C8, and within each component they run from what exists, to who uses it, to how well it works, to what it costs. Metric IDs encode that order, so sorting the registry by ID reproduces it. Prefixes: NS for the GF 2045 goal, LO for Tier 1 outcomes, LX for Tier 2 experience, OP for Tier 3 operations.