Are there credentials currently in your records that belong to people who never received them? The student finished the coursework, met the requirements, but now doesn’t have anything to show for it.
Every student information system (SIS) on the market can run the query. Degree audit tools have found these students for over a decade; you run the report, surface the names, award the degrees, and book the completions.
But after someone in your office has a list of 200 names, maybe more, then what? Which of these people can you actually reach? Do you need their permission first? What about the ones carrying a hold?
As those answers come back, the list gets shorter. Sometimes it gets much shorter. The results from research across 61 colleges show us how much shorter.
When the audit works, but the awarding doesn’t
Project Win-Win ran at 61 colleges across nine states. The Institute for Higher Education Policy published the final results, written by Clifford Adelman, in October 2013. The premise was that somewhere in these records were students who finished and never got the paper.
The audits found 6,733 former students who had already earned an associate degree. Then the project began handing them out, successfully transferring 4,550. The other 2,183 had a credential that their college was holding, and they never received it. The project found the names and confirmed eligibility, but still couldn't get the degree to the person.
One registrar quoted in the report said, "There has to be a degree in there somewhere, but we never looked for it."
Since 2013, the looking has gotten much easier, but the awarding hasn't. In 2023–24, about 62,000 adults with some college and no credential finally earned one, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Roughly 15,000 of them—about one in four—got there without ever re-enrolling. Their institution awarded a credential for work already on the record.
Three ways an earned degree dies
1. You can't find them.
Nearly a quarter of the eligible students couldn't be located. The address on file was years old. The email ended at a null institutional domain that stopped working. The college held a complete academic record for a person it could no longer contact.
2. They have to say yes first.
Two-thirds of participating institutions used opt-in policies, meaning a student had to accept a degree before the college could confer it. And if you can’t reach a student, they can't consent. According to the report, for those students, "their opportunity for a degree is permanently lost barring a change in institutional policy." Some students who could be reached said no anyway, believing an associate degree would close their financial aid window or trigger repayment.
3. Something on the record is blocking it.
Institutions had to work through financial holds and disciplinary holds before they could confer. In some cases, that meant parking tickets and library fines standing between a student and a degree they had already finished.
A degree audit can’t speak to these, since reaching out to them, asking them, and clearing their record are all jobs that sit in your office.
Your records last longer than contact information
Reach only gets worse with time since institutional email typically stops working after a student leaves. When the personal email on file is from the college application years earlier, and the mailing address belongs to a parent who has since moved, you hold authoritative proof of what someone accomplished, with no more options on how to deliver it to them.
Contact data decays no matter how well you maintain it. So what if the credential lived somewhere accessible to the learner and the institution, that won't expire with a campus login, and functions for both current students and alumni?
How to build a repeatable audit
You have a project with a one-time audit. But a repeatable one is an operation, and the difference shows up in four places.
The record has to be consolidated first. | Over half the Win-Win institutions had to rerun their initial data extraction because databases weren't linked or the institution had changed systems mid-period without reconciling them. In a unified platform, that's work you do only once. |
Confirm the consent policy before the audit.
| Opt-in versus automatic conferral is a legitimate debate with real arguments on both sides. It's worse to decide that while a list of 200 names waits, and their contact info ages with every passing week. |
Sort the holds into two piles.
| Some holds protect the institution, and some just block a diploma over a library fine. Those need different answers, and deciding on a case-by-case basis at award time slows an audit down. |
Issue credentials somewhere durable.
| If you send the award to an institutional inbox that stopped working years ago, you’ve done a lot of work for no real pay-off for the learner. When it issues to a destination the learner has access to, your second audit starts from a working address. |
Project Win-Win awarded over 4,500 degrees across its 61 colleges, and a second initiative, Credit When It's Due, awarded more than 16,000 across over 500 institutions. Dozens of learners earned completions from the average college with no recruitment spend and no new enrollment.
Go from audit to credential confidence
A degree audit identifies who finished. But them finding out largely depends on your records system. So if you're planning an award audit, consider whether you could actually deliver the credentials the audit uncovers.
A platform evaluation should answer that, along with the advantages of having transcripts, diplomas, certificates, and badges in one system, and how easily learners can access credentials, both old and new.
Parchment by Instructure issues transcripts, diplomas, certificates, and badges, from one platform to a record the learner keeps after graduation. The Learner Dashboard gives your learners an accessible, single source of truth for storing and sharing all their credentials. If you're building your evaluation criteria, check out [The Higher Education Guide to Evaluating a Credentialing Platform].
