News and information about InCommon Academy offerings

[Dean Woodbeck <>]

National Student Clearinghouse Provides Federated Identity Access to Popular 
Student Self-Service Application

ANN ARBOR, Mich. (June 14, 2010) - The National Student Clearinghouse® has 
made access to its popular web-based Student Self-Service  application 
available through the InCommon Federation. As a result, any college or 
university that participates in InCommon can seamlessly provide their 
students with access to Student Self-Service by leveraging its existing 
campus identity management system. The Clearinghouse, a non-profit 
organization, provides educational reporting, verification, and research 
services to more than 3,300 colleges and universities 

InCommon is the U.S. trust federation in higher education operated by 
Internet2 that provides a privacy-preserving, secure, and scalable method for 
higher education institutions and their partners to offer access to protected 
online resources. InCommon participants use standards-based middleware 
software that allows collaborating organizations – in this case, a higher 
education institution and the Clearinghouse – to exchange a student’s 
relevant “attributes” (e.g., specific class enrollment or student status), 
rather than the student’s identity, to enable access to online resources. 

For the individual user, participation in InCommon provides the convenience 
of leveraging the university login credentials to access any number of 
participating resource providers, like the Clearinghouse. The Clearinghouse’s 
Student Self-Service application provides many useful options for students, 
including printing enrollment verification certificates, ordering 
transcripts, and viewing enrollment history and verifications provided by the 
Clearinghouse on behalf of the school, as well as other features.

The Clearinghouse originally developed a custom authentication mechanism for 
each higher education institution that was integrated into its existing 
authentication methods and portals. Stanford University approached the 
Clearinghouse about using InCommon’s standards-based approach to 
authentication. Stanford students can now use their university IDs and 
passwords to access Student Self-Service. When a student logs in, the 
university’s identity management system only releases relevant attributes 
about the student to the Clearinghouse to enable access to Student 
Self-Service. 

“The InCommon platform enabled us to deploy a single sign-on option for 
Student Self-Service on a proven framework, which could easily be adopted 
later by any other federation members,” said Doug Falk, chief technology 
officer at the Clearinghouse. 

The Clearinghouse worked with Stanford to pilot the use of InCommon for this 
application, and then implemented the solution at the University of Southern 
California and the University of Washington. The federated Student 
Self-Service application is now available to any InCommon participant that 
also participates in the Clearinghouse. For more information on Student 
Self-Service, visit www.studentclearinghouse.org/colleges/sss.


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Dean Woodbeck
Program Manager, InCommon

(734) 352-7007
www.incommon.org