Beyond Borders: Understanding the Development and Mobility of Human Capital in an Age of Data-Driven Accountability

Supported by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, WICHE embarked on a pilot project to develop a Multistate Longitudinal Data Exchange (MLDE). This effort was aimed at building a resource able to track how human capital develops and becomes mobile across a multistate region, and at giving states, for their use in policy and program improvement, access to data that go missing from individual state databases whenever individuals cross state lines. Spanning individual-level data covering K-12 education, postsecondary education, and workforce information systems in four initial states – Hawai‘i, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington – the pilot sought to determine whether a MLDE could serve as such a resource and, if so, how it could be built.

This report describes how this project progressed, presents analytical results from a combined dataset of students who completed high school and started college in any of the four states, discusses the implications of those results, and offers lessons applicable to ongoing efforts to build and use longitudinal data systems for policy and practice.