SBE: Sole Source - National Student Clearinghouse

The Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) is pursuing a sole source procurement with the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) for the Student Tracker for State Agencies project, to be executed from July 1, 2025, to June 30, 2027. The contract involves NSC providing comprehensive post-secondary enrollment data reports on Illinois high school graduates, including detailed student-level and aggregate reporting. Specific deliverables include reports on student enrollment, persistence, and degree attainment, with expanded data elements such as gender, ethnicity, economic disadvantage, disability status, and test scores to support ESSA requirements. The procurement is structured as a sole source contract, with a hearing scheduled to be potentially canceled unless written comments or hearing requests are submitted by Friday, April 25, 2025, at 4 p.m. NSC will submit up to eight years of historic graduate data and four years of request files, enabling ISBE to receive critical educational tracking information. The procurement timeline includes a posting date of April 14, 2025, and a final due date of April 30, 2025.

The contract appears to have no specific set-aside designations, though it is a targeted procurement with NSC as the exclusive vendor due to their unique data capabilities. NSC is considered the sole source provider because they maintain a comprehensive nationwide database of over 110 million student records from more than 3,700 participating colleges and universities, covering 99% of students in public and private U.S. institutions. The contract's total value is $422,688, calculated at $425 per high school with enrollments over 200 students, based on 518 qualifying schools, with an 8% discount applied for the two-year contract term. Funding will be sourced from federal funds, and NSC's FERPA-compliant data access makes them the only viable vendor for this specific data collection and reporting requirement. The procurement is specifically designed to leverage NSC's unique nationwide educational tracking capabilities, which would be impossible for ISBE to independently collect or replicate.