Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council (PESC)

Community

PESC describes the community as “an open standards-development and open standards-setting body for Admissions, Financial Aid, and Registrar Offices, governed by a voluntary, consensus-based model, funded independently by annual membership dues, meetings, and sponsorships. In fulfilling its non-profit mission, PESC makes all PESC approved standards and technical information available to the education community online free of charge.”

To learn more about the PESC community, see https://www.pesc.org/about-pesc-1.html.

Standards

PESC-approved standards are numerous. They cover data typically related to or stewarded by admissions, financial aid, and registrar’s offices within the postsecondary education.

Per PESC:

“Approved standards are available openly and free of charge for education and workforce, health and medical, military and government, and all teaching and learning communities — the cornerstone principle of PESC, PESC's Mission and PESC's Membership… [They] are Workgroup developed, proposed, approved, ratified and maintained through an open, transparent, rigorous, community-based, collaborative process, which includes a public notification when development initiates and a formal 30-day public comment period before approval, all governed by PESC Members.

“PESC Approved standards are platform and application neutral; used, implemented, adopted and integrated in systems, networks, products and services applications; are hub and spoke and web services friendly; support a transaction or business process; and, can be implemented or used one independently from another.

“One [approved standard] (e.g. the College Transcript Standard) is made available in several different technologies (e.g. EDI, JSON, PDF, XML), providing more technical choice for users.

“The EDI, JSON, PDF and XML data modeling guidelines and specifications, definitions and business processes are aligned and governed under PESC's Standards Development Forum for Education. This alignment instills trust between different technologies, enables reliable data mapping across different technologies, and ensures data quality and integrity across different technologies.” To learn more, see here: https://www.pesc.org/pesc-approved-standards-1.html.

To explore examples of best practices in implementation, take a look at PESC’s published list of annual award winners here.