What exactly does National Student Clearinghouse do with regards to transcripts, and how do they do it?
What I’m saying, is I know that many colleges and universities use them for transcript distribution. I know that they accept payment. But how do they get a copy of the transcript? Do they mail the transcript or does the school mail the transcript? Where are the transcripts mailed from?
Yup, I’m curious about odd things. Please do share if you know.
I used them to send transcripts from my colleges. My employers received these via snail mail. I requested a copy for my files as well…and mine came in the snail mail as well.
I have no idea what the middle man process was…but there was NO choice in terms of using this service for my schools…and really, it went very smoothly.
I used to work at a university and we decided to use the National Student Clearinghouse for transcripts.
Stage 1 for us - when students (or former students) requested a transcript, the link on our website was directed to the National Student Clearinghouse webpage we set up. Some data was collected, such as name, address, where the transcript should be sent, etc. They also collected the payment. Our registrar’s office could decide if they wanted to receive the requests as they happened, or download the requests in batches. During stage one, we actually fulfilled the requests at the university but used the Clearinghouse for the management of the process.
We did stage 1 because we were going to stage 2. We (in IT) created a secure connection from our student database so when transcripts were requested, if there were no issues (no holds, no errors, could find the student in our database) the Clearinghouse actually received the feed of data and fulfilled the transcript request. There was a record of the request and fulfillment sent back into our student database.
So, depending on the school’s process, the transcripts could be mailed from the school, or the Clearinghouse.