Background

The NSPA Scholarship Program Data Standard was originally developed in 2017 with funding from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation. The goal is to provide a common data structure and data exchange format to support scholarship program data analysis and robust program search and matching features in student-facing solutions.

The standard development effort is sponsored by the National Scholarship Providers Association (NSPA) whose members represent many perspectives from the scholarship industry, with the Dell Foundation continuing to supply technical support.

The data standard is suitable for API- and file-based data exchanges. Technically speaking, the standard is a data model, with schema expressed in both an XSD specification and a JSON Schema specification. The two specification expressions are equivalent, meaning the semantics between the formats are the same and the same information can be exchanged regardless of the schema technology.

The NSPA Scholarship Program data model defines a single scholarship program sponsored by a single organization. The data model contains core information about the program such as the scholarship program name, award amount, application method and location, eligibility requirements, and so forth. The data model also contains context fields, such as when the data was last verified, when the data was created, and so forth.

What is this Documentation?

This documentation describes the general organization of the NSPA Scholarship Program Data Standard. This documentation is also a companion piece to the relatively terse annotation in the schema by providing general guidelines, additional context, implementation notes, and illustrative examples.

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