Celebrating a Center of Hope for African-American Youth

By Pat Roe, Vice President, Philanthropy, Strada Education Network

In the mid-’70s, Indianapolis community leaders cited a number of reasons why African-American youth were failing to graduate from high school, not entering college, and falling short in career achievement. The Center for Leadership Development (CLD) answered the call to develop meaningful experiences to promote education and careers to students and their parents.

Forty years and thousands of success stories later, CLD continues to foster academic excellence for minority students. At the recent Minority Achievers Awards & Scholarship Gala, 3,000 people packed the Indiana Convention Center to see CLD award more than $3.2 million in scholarships to 46 local students. These students will attend 20 higher education institutions in Indiana as well as schools outside of the state. The scholarships also will support attendance at Indiana high schools.

One high-achieving student I spoke with that night, Zipporah Melton, received a scholarship to attend North Carolina A&T State University. Through CLD, she received assistance with medical career exploration, preparing for college, and preparing for the SAT. She has taken part in networking and volunteerism.

“Through the Center for Leadership Development, I have gained great leadership skills that will help me succeed in life,” she says. “I’m very thankful for this life-changing experience.”

The event also honored outstanding minority achievement in the Indianapolis community.

As amazing as the gala was, it’s just the latest success for CLD and the many students and families it’s served. Statistics for 2016 offer a snapshot of why CLD often is called “A Center of Hope.”

In its four decades of serving Indianapolis minority students and their families, CLD has demonstrated a commitment to transformative programming. CLD offers values-based, results-driven guidance and instruction from caring, local, college-educated professionals.

Through more than a dozen programs, CLD addresses the opportunity gaps that persist for young people of color. The organization supports students age 10-18 through services such as:

• Career advising.
• Academic assessments.
• No-cost reading assistance and tutoring.
• Licensed guidance counseling.
• College research and selection assistance.
• Success planning.
• Internship opportunities.
• Career assessments.

Additionally, CLD partners with 23 higher education institutions throughout the state to provide full and partial scholarships to cover tuition and room and board as well as equipment and study-abroad opportunities.

Dennis Bland, president of the Center for Leadership Development, addresses the 3,000 attendees at CLD’s Minority Achievers Awards & Scholarship Gala in March. Photo by Nicole Powell Photography.

CLD President Dennis Bland sums up the organization’s success in bolstering students’ academic and career achievement in this way: “For years the Center for Leadership Development has stood as an answer for so many youth and families. CLD stands as a beacon, a true Center of Hope, for youth and families throughout the African-American community.”

That Center of Hope for education and career success aligns with the Strada Education Network^SM focus on Completion With a Purpose^®, enhancing student success in college — or other postsecondary education programs — and careers. We’re proud to support the work of CLD to create the best college and career pathways for African-American students in our hometown of Indianapolis.

This School Doesn’t Give Up on Struggling Students

By Roderick Wheeler, Senior Program Director, Philanthropy, Strada Education Network

Although the high school dropout rate has declined significantly since the 1990’s, each year more than 1.2 million U.S. students continue to leave high school with no diploma. As a result, approximately 7,000 students each day are giving up short of earning the most critical educational credential necessary for their future success.

It’s well documented that many high school dropouts face immense challenges throughout their lives. They earn less than high school graduates. They experience higher rates of unemployment, poverty and incarceration. They have much lower rates of labor market participation — in 2014, 41 percent compared with 73 percent for high school graduates.

Since 2003 an Indiana school has demonstrated significant success in getting struggling students, or those who have already dropped out of high school, across the finish line to their diplomas. Rob Staley, the founder of The Crossing School of Business and Entrepreneurship (formerly known as the Crossing Educational Center), sought to address the dropout challenge in his community by creating a state-accredited, faith-based, private alternative school that partners with public school districts to graduate their students who are struggling most, even if they already have dropped out of high school.

Staley, a former Indiana high school principal, says the impetus behind founding The Crossing came from some of his former students. “I would visit students I had expelled and who were now in jail and ask them why school did not work for them,” he says. “I would learn that they did not feel like they belonged or that school was relevant to helping them earn a living.”

As a result, Staley created an innovative school that seeks to empower struggling students to become contributing members of their communities through academics, job training and faith-based character education. His vision for The Crossing was to transform lives of young people through education, by focusing on both the heart and mind.

The Crossing model is designed to engage students as they develop their academic and job-preparedness skills. Half of the students’ time is devoted to earning academic credit. The Crossing uses technology-assisted blended learning and supportive student services to help students to master the required academic content for Indiana’s non-waiver diploma. The other half of the students’ time is spent in job preparedness training; the students are exposed to the world of work through the business development component of the job training program.

With support from Strada Education, The Crossing students gain micro-business experience by making and selling handmade candles.

The business development course is a credit-bearing course that uses project-based learning, an experiential learning curriculum, and various industry-recognized certifications that prepare students to launch micro-businesses. The curriculum allows students to understand real-world business skills and principles by understanding how to operate and run an actual micro-business.

Students develop their skills in business plan development, marketing, profit and loss statements, and sales. Upon completion of the course, students are assigned to work teams and placed in local businesses. The ultimate goal is that students will become members of the workforce pool and be directly employed by a host company upon earning their high school diplomas.

The Crossing began with one campus, six students and two teachers. Today, it has grown to 25 locations, serving more than 2,000 students and employing approximately 160 staff members. It has contracts with 55 public schools. In the past four years, The Crossing has graduated 635 students, and nearly 80 percent have earned Indiana’s Core 40 diploma, without any special consideration. Among all of The Crossing’s graduates, more than 80 percent are either working or pursuing additional postsecondary education opportunities.

By partnering with public school districts to help them outsource their alternative education and dropout prevention programs, The Crossing also has found a strong collaborative business model that supports the organization’s financial sustainability and allows it to grow and advance its mission.

Strada Education Network^SM is pleased to support The Crossing with a philanthropic investment to help expand the entrepreneurial and micro-business development program that prepares students for internship opportunities and entry-level jobs following high school.

With more than 5 million disconnected youth and young adults age 16-24 who are not in school and not working, our nation needs more programs like The Crossing that seek to re-engage students and prepare them for workforce opportunities and greater success in life.

Six Strategies Growing the Talent Pipeline Movement

By Jaimie Francis, Director, Programs and Operations, U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation Center for Education and Workforce

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation started the Talent Pipeline Management (TPM) initiative with the support of Strada Education Network^SM, then known as USA Funds^®, in 2014. Since that time, we have seen continued buy-in by the business community of applying supply chain management principles to workplace talent acquisition.

Business leaders gravitate to this six-strategy approach because it makes business sense. Their willingness to engage has fueled our goal to inform the employer community about this new model and demonstrate how employers can operationalize TPM within their companies, industries and regions.

Demand-driven process
Employers recognize that TPM exemplifies what it means to be “demand-driven” because employers lead the charge. Historically, business was just another player at the table in education partnerships.

TPM, however, puts employer partners in a room with one another to have conversations driven by their needs, in what we call employer collaboratives (Strategy 1).

These collaboratives focus on identifying what factors or unfilled positions are inhibiting them from growing their businesses (Strategy 2) and what kinds of skills are needed to fill those positions (Strategy 3).

The collaboratives also examine where employers are getting their talent and whether those training and education partners have the ability to fill the needed demand (Strategy 4).

From there, the TPM approach notes how to use the talent pipeline data collected to encourage their training partners to become more responsive to employer needs (Strategy 5). The process ultimately provides a smoother and more successful transition to employment for learners.

The demand-driven approach of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation Talent Pipeline Management initiative features six strategies.

The strategies were not created in a vacuum. The original TPM network of business-led organizations tested our theories and provided the invaluable feedback that led to the creation of the TPM Academy. The Academy is a train-the-trainer model that unpacks the TPM strategies into a curriculum that participants can apply to projects in their own communities.

Since October, USCCF has welcomed 44 participants from across the country, representing chambers of commerce, economic development agencies, and trade associations. These business-facing leaders are interested in solving skills gap challenges in industries like health care, manufacturing, energy, transportation, food production — you name it.

Curriculum and online tool
In concert with the curriculum and in response to our original network’s feedback that a central platform was needed to execute these strategies, we have created an online tool that will allow the host organization to easily communicate with its employer partners.

The curriculum and the web tool will be available to the public this summer because USCCF and Strada Education are strong believers in sharing resources and getting feedback on how to improve. We hope providing this information will build our arsenal of business-led examples demonstrating how to improve pipelines and benefit learners, training and education provider partners and employers.

TPM has demonstrated the ability for employers to take a heightened leadership role in managing their relationships with each other and with training and education providers. But we don’t claim to have found the silver bullet or that, once executed, TPM will be the answer to all of our prayers. It is a process meant to be re-evaluated and modified based on the assumption that employer needs will change, and with those changes will come the opportunity to create more crystal clear pathways for learner success (Strategy 6).

And we won’t stop here.

Plans for the future
Next up is an opportunity to build statewide TPM academies. This step will expand our reach while taking into account state policies that impact employer-led initiatives to close the skills gap. We will have the opportunity to test this approach with a number of states that have bought into the process and are ready to share the knowledge with their employer partners.

TPM has spurred our thinking about how employers can share with the public information about providers of education and training that successfully prepare learners. We also are interested in establishing a central platform for employers to communicate their changing competency and credential requirements via a job profile registry.

The future is bright for the evolution of talent pipelines. Stay tuned.

Implementing Adaptive Learning Courseware? New Guide Can Help

By Lorenzo L. Esters, Vice President, Philanthropy, Strada Education Network

One of the most innovative opportunities for addressing student success and personalizing learning today is the use of adaptive courseware. The courseware allows educators to tailor the instructional experience based on a learner’s individual needs.

A new guide aims to help institutions implement the tools that facilitate this personalized approach to instruction.

The Implementing Adaptive Courseware guide is the result of a two-year effort through the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU). In that project, APLU’s Personalized Learning Consortium coordinated the development and implementation of adaptive courseware for use in first-year English composition instruction. Faculty teams from four universities — Georgia State University, Montclair State University, the University of Georgia and the University of Mississippi — developed and piloted the courseware.

A new guide from the APLU Personalized Learning Consortium focuses on adaptive courseware development, use and evaluation.

The project featured collaboration between institutions, faculty and students to develop scalable adaptive learning practices. Twelve faculty members contributed to the courseware or deployed it in their English composition courses with 463 students in 2016.

Goals of the project were to:

• Engage faculty in the development and use of next-generation learning technologies and explore how adaptive approaches can improve learner mastery.
• Create a discipline-specific cohort of faculty.
• Support the development of learning modules using an adaptive platform.
• Pilot learning modules in English composition courses at multiple institutions.
• Evaluate and report on institutions’ experiences with adaptive courseware, and its impact on student learning.

Strada Education Network℠, formerly USA Funds^®, supported the project to help promote innovative approaches to college and career preparation. The work is in line with Strada Education’s focus on Completion With a Purpose^®, enhancing student success in college — or other postsecondary programs — and connecting graduates to rewarding careers and fulfilling lives.

The new guide outlines the steps involved in engaging faculty in the development and implementation of adaptive learning technologies, and tips and ideas for overcoming obstacles along the way.

Lynn Brabender

I asked Lynn Brabender, program manager for the APLU Personalized Learning Consortium, about the project and the lessons learned.

Q: Why was collaboration important in this project?

By collaborating across institutions, faculty members were able to share ideas and identify common skills, learning objectives and content for first-year English composition courses. They had the opportunity to brainstorm the potential use of adaptive courseware to support these learning objectives and identify technology platform capabilities to support instruction.

Q: How should institutions approach the selection of an adaptive learning courseware platform?

We brought together faculty members from the participating institutions and representatives of courseware vendors for an in-person meeting. After presentations by each vendor, the faculty selected the vendor determined to be best suited to provide the tools to develop the courseware envisioned.

Because adaptive learning platforms are emerging technologies, there can be challenges related to the courseware’s capacity to meet faculty expectations. We learned that, in selecting the right tools for the task, it is important that there is a clear understanding not only about your instructional needs and goals — but also about your timeframe for development.

Q: What role should faculty play in developing personalized learning courseware?

Engaging faculty members in this project allowed them to broaden their understanding of adaptive courseware and explore its potential use for personalizing instruction.

Regularly engaging participating faculty, in person when possible, allows them to track progress, discuss common areas of concern, and prepare for training. Even evaluating tools that do not meet their needs can help them — and their students — to engage in the adaptive learning process. A high level of direct support to faculty is critical to ensuring that they can best develop the learning platform, so we established regular office hours for facilitating that support during this project.

Q: What did you learn about the value of adaptive learning courseware?

Faculty expressed optimism about the potential of adaptive courseware as a valuable tool for personalized learning. Students enjoyed the interactivity of the courseware and ability to receive feedback from professors and were receptive to expanding the use of adaptive learning technologies.

We view this project, and the resulting guide, as a starting point for campus-based or multi-institution faculty teams seeking to launch adaptive courseware initiatives.

Top Education Ideas Connect College and Career Through Technology

By Alison Griffin, Senior Vice President, External and Government Relations, Strada Education Network

How might we better prepare all learners for the needs of tomorrow by reimagining higher education?

OpenIDEO has announced the Top Ideas in its Future of Higher Education Challenge — and the results suggest the answer to that question lies in connecting college and career through use of educational technology.

A tool that uses data to connect learners to careers. Apps that support students through the educational journey and beyond. Online options that support education for career advancement. The Top Ideas aim to help learners of all kinds evolve with the needs of tomorrow — not just as they pursue higher education but also as they put that education to work in their careers and communities.

And technology, the Top Ideas remind us, is important not only in meeting the changing needs of students and the workforce but also in making those solutions broadly available.

Strada Education Network℠, formerly USA Funds^®, is a sponsor of the Future of Higher Education Challenge. I was proud to serve as an evaluator in this months-long search for innovative postsecondary education ideas, joined by my colleagues Craig Anderson and Tammy Lakes of Student Connections and Mike Marriner of Roadtrip Nation, both Strada Education companies.

In the Future of Higher Education Challenge, OpenIDEO called on the global community for ideas to better prepare students for active civic engagement, real-world employment and career success in an ever-transforming economy. The submissions named Top Ideas last week are:

Sidekick Education tool that collects data about how students work side-by-side with industry experts to solve real-world problems, and uses that data to connect students to their ideal careers.

MyBoard: Meet Your Own Personal Board app and desktop tool that places students with teams of “life board members” who meet regularly with those students during and following their education.

MAPP — My Action Plan with Purpose, which combines an interactive “vision MAPP” of careers and lifestyles with mentoring to guide learners to academic, personal and professional success.

Anyone’s Learning Experience (ALEX) online marketplace that helps professionals advance their careers by taking individual, in-person courses from across colleges, universities and training programs.

PeletonU addresses the needs of nontraditional students by combining online, competency-based education with in-person support to help working adults succeed.

Those involved in the Top Ideas now will have the opportunity to discuss and refine their innovations with sector experts. We’ll learn more from those who submitted the Top Ideas at events such as the upcoming Strada Education-sponsored ASU GSV Summit.

And at Strada Education, we look forward to continuing to advance ideas like those selected as the leaders through the Future of Higher Education Challenge. They’re ideas that, like Strada Education’s own guiding principle of Completion With a Purpose^®, enhance student success in college — or other postsecondary programs — and connect graduates to rewarding careers and fulfilling lives.

Shining a Light on Opportunities in College and Career

By Daryl Graham, Senior Vice President, Philanthropy, USA Funds

I often am struck by the many opportunities I have had in my career and my life, thanks to the college degree I received many years ago. And then I think about the challenges that today’s college students face — challenges that too often prevent them from enjoying the myriad opportunities my degree has afforded me.

That’s why I’m proud to have joined an organization so committed to ensuring that students not only have access to college or other postsecondary training, but that they also complete that higher education prepared for successful careers and fulfilling lives.

In fact, you could say I was a proponent of USA Funds^®’ focus — Completion With a Purpose^® — long before it became my job in February.

For 15 years I have worked to identify opportunities for grant making, sponsorships and volunteerism. I look forward to putting that experience to work both in the Indianapolis community, where USA Funds is based, and across the nation — particularly for at-risk youth and disconnected young adults.

I’ve long been committed to the principle behind Completion With a Purpose, that students need to understand their opportunities and follow their own surest paths to completing postsecondary education or training and succeeding at work and life.

Because where there are opportunities, there is hope. Hope not only for better-educated and productive individuals, but also for a better society in Indianapolis, across Indiana, and in other states and cities whose citizens understand and follow their clearest pathways to success.

Achieving these positive results for individuals and communities will require some rethinking, a willingness to embrace innovative ideas for higher education. We even need to consider the larger question of what quality postsecondary education means today.

Educational institutions at all levels as well as employers, policymakers and community-based organizations must be willing to work together to enhance the value of post-high school education. We must be open to evaluating data that show the best opportunities for success, whether those opportunities come through degrees from majority higher education institutions, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, community colleges, or through other forms of certification and credentialing.

And USA Funds already is helping to lead this charge for boosting college and career success.

In a professional life already filled with opportunity, built on the foundation that my education has provided, I consider my new role in helping USA Funds advance Completion With a Purpose to be one of my greatest opportunities yet. I embrace that opportunity and look forward to making a difference for students and their communities.

The Intersection of Instruction and Outcomes

By Lorenzo Esters, Vice President, Philanthropy, USA Funds

What is the relationship between college instruction and student outcomes?

A new paper examines that question in five key areas — making the case that “what faculty do and how instruction occurs matter, and matter greatly.”

“Unpacking Relationships: Instruction and Student Outcomes,” from the American Council on Education (ACE), argues for additional support for faculty, to ensure they’re equipped to follow the evidence-based practices that have a positive impact on student outcomes

The paper is part of a collaboration between ACE and USA Funds^® to examine higher education instruction and assess the connection between quality teaching and an improved student experience, which may lead to increased retention, persistence, and success rates.

Author Natasha Jankowski, director of the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment, discussed the paper during a recent webinar for higher education faculty, support staff and administrators and employers.

The goal? To disseminate a composite of best practices in college instruction that often aren’t considered as part of the holistic student experience. This intersection between instruction and student outcomes, the paper concludes, includes the following areas:

Transparency: Students must have a clear understanding of where they are going, the criteria that will evaluate how they get there, and each course’s role in the curriculum.

Pedagogical approaches: Practices such as student-centered learning and personalized instruction generally lead to deeper understanding of a subject.

Assessment: Students learn best by receiving multiple opportunities to practice learning in a variety of situations and by receiving feedback along the way.

Self-regulation: Active participation in learning, using reflection in addition to experience, is an important component in student success.

Alignment: Content, instructional design, pedagogical approaches, assignments and evaluative criteria should work together to help students to connect the pieces in their curricula.

During the January webinar, the report’s author called for more-thorough orientation, training and sharing among instructors to encourage these best practices in college instruction. Up next are additional reports that go beyond connections between effective instruction and student outcomes to examine the impact improved student outcomes have on institutional efficiency.

“Unpacking Relationships” is part of a USA Funds grant project aimed at improving the classroom experience for students.

Equipping faculty with the tools and techniques necessary to positively impact the curricular experience for an increasingly diverse student population is central to improving postsecondary attainment and student success.

Through our work together, USA Funds and ACE will advance the most central endeavor to the academic enterprise — effective instruction. We will help increase awareness of the need for quality assessment of faculty development that will ultimately lead to an improved classroom experience for students.

Partnership Addresses Kentucky’s Talent Pipeline Needs

By Derek Redelman, Vice President, Research & Policy, USA Funds

Engage with any chamber of commerce in the country these days, and you’re certain to hear its members’ concerns about the workforce.

In my previous role, heading up education and workforce issues for the Indiana Chamber of Commerce, no issue was more persistently at the top of our agenda. Sure, a lot of our members would identify some other issue as their highest concern — whether it was health care, a range of regulatory issues, labor rules, taxes or something else. But on the whole, across any state or regional business community, no issue was more persistent than their concerns about education and the workforce.

Moreover, those concerns have real consequences — real numbers that affect bottom lines, employment and, ultimately, the economy as a whole.

Just last year, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that there were nearly 6 million unfilled jobs in our country. And numbers like that seem to persist, to a significant degree, regardless of overall economic conditions. During the height of our recent “Great Recession” — when unemployment rates in some states, like USA Funds^®’ home state of Indiana, were flirting with double-digit numbers — 40 percent of the employers in the state reported they could not find qualified workers to fill vacant positions.

More recently, as unemployment rates declined, the Indiana Chamber reported that percentage had increased to 45 percent.

So it should be little surprise that those representing businesses, including chambers of commerce, have taken such a keen interest in education and workforce issues. At the national level, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation has been a leader on such issues, from preschool to academic standards to workforce issues and more. The Manufacturing Institute, a branch of the National Association of Manufacturers; the Business Roundtable; and the Business-Higher Education Forum are among other organizations focusing on education and the workforce.

Affecting change
At statehouses across the country, chambers of commerce often are the most consistent, and sometimes the loudest and most effective, advocates of education reform and improved higher education and workforce systems. Moreover, their political action arms often are responsible for electing the legislators who drive these reforms. And in many states, chamber foundations add to these efforts with research and other special initiatives.

The Kentucky Chamber of Commerce ranks among the most active and effective chambers in its work on education issues.

So it is with great anticipation that USA Funds is providing a grant to the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce to help establish a Kentucky Chamber Workforce Center. Through that new center, the Chamber will engage the business community to help advance several initiatives for addressing the needs of employers. Among those efforts are:

• Creation of additional business collaboratives, in concert with the Talent Pipeline Management initiative that USA Funds is supporting with the U.S. Chamber.
• Assistance to employers who serve on state and local workforce boards or participate in other workforce or educational leadership roles.
• Increased focus on data, including the supply/demand tools that USA Funds has helped to initiate through our college value-focused work.
• Engagement of government and education leaders to help ensure better communication and cooperation between suppliers of talent and those who hire their trainees and graduates.

Announcing our partnership
On Jan. 25 I had the pleasure of attending and speaking to the Kentucky Chamber’s 2nd Annual Workforce Summit in Lexington. The capacity audience included an impressive group of workforce training and education providers, small-to-large employers, and key government leaders. Presentations and discussions focused on:

• Workforce trends.
• Employer needs.
• Improving opportunities for military veterans.
• Employer engagement.
• Workplace learning and apprenticeships.
• Improved use of workforce data.

USA Funds announced our commitment to the Chamber’s efforts at the event’s lunch, which also included the introduction of Beth Davisson as executive director of the new Kentucky Chamber Workforce Center. The Chamber recently hired Beth from a large pool of candidates, and she brings a terrific set of skills to this work. She previously served in both workforce and human resource leadership roles, and she has been recognized as a “Top Business Leader Under 40” and among the “Top 20 People to Know in Human Resources.”

Dave Adkisson, from left, and Beth Davisson of the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce join Redelman at the Kentucky Chamber’s 2nd Annual Workforce Summit.

Developed in partnership with Anna Gatlin Schilling, USA Funds’ vice president for National Engagement and Strategic Communications, our investment in Kentucky also represents a new approach to investments in state leadership. Whereas previous state engagements have provided direct support to governors’ offices, this grant extends that work to a nongovernmental organization with direct connections to and support of a key education constituency: the state’s employers.

Importantly, however, the demonstrated partnership already developed between the Kentucky Chamber and the state’s new governor, Matt Bevin, played an important role in the decision to support these efforts.

As I told the attendees at lunch on Jan. 25, it’s quite impolitic in the middle of basketball season for a Hoosier native to speak so well of our neighbors to the south. But it is with great pleasure — and also high expectations — that USA Funds initiates this partnership with our neighbors in Kentucky.

Key Themes, Practices Emerge in Re-Imagining First Year of College

By George L. Mehaffy, Vice President for Academic Leadership and Change, AASCU

A newly released study indicates that rich and poor students who graduate from college achieve similar income levels as adults, no matter the income of their families. This is an exciting finding, for it suggests that the American dream is still obtainable, despite growing economic inequality.

But college graduation rates — particularly those of low-income and first-generation students — are not as good as they should be. This lack of success in college wastes the potential of thousands of students, while limiting the capacity of our economy.

USA Funds’ Lorenzo Esters, left, joins Mehaffy after the presentation of the USA Funds RFY grant in 2015.

We know that there are a series of strategies and programs that can dramatically improve student retention and graduation rates. But, too often, implementation has proven to be a problem.

Re-imagining education
To address these implementation issues, we created the three-year project “Re-Imagining the First Year of College (RFY),” supported by USA Funds^® and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

RFY seeks to identify and test a series of programs, strategies and tools that will increase retention rates and success for all first-year college students. The project, which began in January 2016, involves a diverse group of 44 campuses that are members of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU).

As part of the initiative, a team from each participating institution is developing a campus plan for innovation in students’ first year. Members of that team are administrators, faculty members, student affairs professionals and students.

Themes for change
In the first year of the project, as we have engaged in this work with our campuses, we have found ourselves addressing several recurring themes:

1. How do you build a commitment to simultaneous, scalable change? What we’ve seen is modest — almost timid — efforts at innovation. It’s easy to be innovative if you are not trying to be comprehensively innovative. But the era of pilots and boutique innovation is over. What we now must have is large-scale innovation that dramatically changes the student success profile for a campus. This innovation requires multiple sets of changes across all parts of the enterprise. It is a daunting challenge, but we see examples of campuses that are achieving remarkable results.
2. The most fundamental problem with American universities is that they were designed for us, not for our students. Classes offered at inconvenient times. Administrative offices in separate buildings. Services that are not available at the times that students need them, or are available only in distant locations. These examples and a host of others grow out of an organization designed primarily for its faculty and staff. In their 1995 Change magazine article, Robert Barr and John Tagg put it this way: The core problem with higher education is that our institutions were designed as teaching institutions, not as learning institutions, confusing means and ends.
3. Two factors in institutional change stand out: culture and leadership. A 2005 AASCU study examined 12 high-performing institutions to determine the critical factors that contributed to high graduation rates. The study repeatedly found that a campus culture that supported student success, by assuming some of the responsibility for success, produced higher graduation rates. Strong institutional leadership that emphasized the campus obligation to student success was key. Now the challenge of how to change campus culture is a constant topic of our work.
4. Some student failure is not the fault of students but of the structures, policies and practices we have put in place. We have to examine the conditions we created that contribute to student failure. Arcane language, a complex and often unforgiving system to navigate, and a host of other factors all contribute to student failure. And these factors — under our control, not the students’ — have the most deleterious effect on low-income and first generation students and students of color.

Promising approaches
As our 44 RFY campuses have designed new policies, strategies and practices, here are some approaches we think are most promising for redesigning the first year of college:

• Belonging: Having a growth mindset both in student self-perceptions and in academic design.
• Pathways: Providing well-defined pathways, detailed degree maps, and alternatives to college algebra.
• Careers and meta-majors: Placing special importance on these choices in the first year.
• Remedial: Offering co–requisites and summer bridge programs.
• Course redesign: Reworking gateway courses, focusing on learning outcomes, including high-impact practices in all courses, and developing classes that focus on student interest and engagement.
• Advising: Using a team of professional advisers, informed by data analytics.
• Predictive and data analytics: Building in early alerts, based on communications with faculty and advisers.
• Faculty hiring and development: Focusing on new faculty selection, extended onboarding, faculty development, and greater support for adjunct faculty.

This project, in summary, is both sobering and heartening at the same time. The work of changing an institution is enormously complicated, with a huge array of forces at work, many working in opposition to one another. But the campuses in the Re-Imagining project are alive with energy, excitement and commitment, engaging in substantive conversations and altering long-existing practices to contribute to student success.

Perhaps most importantly, I have been struck by the belief that, in helping more students succeed, we are helping our country succeed. This is work that all of us in higher education must undertake.

Advancing the Higher Education Innovation Agenda

By Bill Hansen, USA Funds President and CEO

Sixty years ago this October, the Soviet Union’s launch of a tiny satellite called Sputnik shocked the United States out of its complacency over the education levels of its citizens. Our nation responded with an array of innovative new policies and practices to enhance Americans’ skill levels — especially in science, math and engineering — and open the doors of higher education to millions of new students.

With economists now reporting that we are nearing “full employment,” and with recent wage gains, our nation again risks becoming complacent about the results it is achieving from its higher education system. Even with these gains, the level of economic angst remains high, fueled in part by the large number of working-age adults who have dropped out of the workforce and concerns about the quality of the new jobs being created.

Despite an uptick in the economy, a persistent misalignment of graduates’ skills and competencies with the needs of the workforce threatens our future prosperity. This misalignment results in many graduates’ having too long a glide path to rewarding careers, and leaves many employers challenged to find qualified candidates to fill the jobs they need to grow their businesses.

To address this challenge, I believe we need to ignite a new spirit of innovation and creativity in higher education within the academy, abetted by employers and policymakers, and tapping well-tested solutions from private enterprise.

Bill Hansen, left, with David Johnson of Central Indiana Corporate Partnership/BioCrossroads, answers audience questions at the Jan. 24 Economic Club of Indiana luncheon.

I had the opportunity to share the following examples of innovative new approaches with nearly 600 business, civic and education leaders at this week’s luncheon of the Economic Club of Indiana:

Listening to the voice of the consumer in higher education. I believe the experiences that former students had in higher education and the outcomes of those experiences can inform and enhance efforts to improve student success rates. Our partnership with Gallup will share these insights from surveys of 10,000 adults every month.

Helping college-bound students and their parents, as well as working adults, make better postsecondary program choices based on outcomes rather than inputs. Groundbreaking resources such as Indiana’s College Return on Investment Reports and Indiana College Value Index allow students to compare college programs based on their cost and student debt levels, employment rates for and earnings of their graduates, and graduates’ satisfaction with their jobs and lives.

Equipping students and working adults with resources to explore how they can translate their life passions into careers. Resources such as those offered by Roadtrip Nation  allow both students and adults to discover their unique paths through education to their life goals. I am especially proud of the recent production The Next Mission, which follows three veterans of military service as they explore with other vets the transition to civilian life.

Building a strong connection between K-12 and postsecondary education. Purdue Polytechnic Indianapolis, which will open this fall, is an exciting effort to improve the connection to college, and ultimately to rewarding STEM careers, for inner-city students.

Modernizing the financing of college. Our financial aid programs have successfully promoted near-universal access to higher education. But those programs are less successful in promoting college completion, and our federal student loan program was built for a different era. I suggest that we explore promising alternatives, like income-share agreements, such as Purdue’s Back a Boiler  program. Money management and student loan repayment support programs, like those from Student Connections℠, help ensure students have the “fiscal fitness” to complete college and launch their careers without drowning in debt.

Supporting all students, but especially low-income and first-generation students, to persist and complete their studies. These students typically arrive on campus without the college survival skills or support networks that their classmates enjoy. An initiative involving the Indiana Commission for Higher Education, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Indiana State University, Ivy Tech Community College  and Inside Track to provide student success coaches  to 21st Century Scholars so far has shown promising results in improving retention rates for these low- and moderate-income students.

Exposing students to the world of work throughout their years in education. Quality internships, apprenticeships and work experiences, such as that offered by Education at Work, help students earn income and tuition assistance to pay college costs, while also equipping them with “soft skills” that they will need in their careers and connecting them to potential employers.

I believe these examples represent the start of a higher education innovation agenda that will produce better outcomes for students and help employers enrich their talent pipelines. I invite you to share and discuss this list with your colleagues, and submit your suggestions for this agenda in the comments section by selecting the comment icon at the upper right of this article.