Major Systems Unite to Close College Achievement Gap

According to the Education Trust, "Participants in the Access to Success initiative, a project of the National Association of System Heads (NASH), are stepping into the vanguard of higher education by publicly pursuing aggressive goals aimed at improving student outcomes and closing by at least half the gaps in both college-going and degree completion that separate low-income and minority students from others." A significant group of university system heads has agreed to collaborate, publish and share data, and has established a joint time frame.

Here's a link to the official press release and more information from the Education Trust, and here is a link to the Inside Higher Ed article about it by Doug Lederman, which is quoted from, below. A related Chronicle of Higher Education article by Peter Schmidt is here; subscription and registration are required to access it.

Kirwan and 18 other leaders of state college and university systems are unveiling a plan today aimed at doing just that. As part of “Access to Success,” a joint effort of the National Association of System Heads and the Education Trust, a nonprofit group that advocates for the “high academic achievement of all students at all levels,” the public college systems all have agreed to cut in half within eight years their own gaps in college-going and college graduation rates for low-income students and those from underrepresented minority groups.

The systems, a list of which appears at the bottom of this article, will begin publicly reporting uniform data on the rate at which low-income and minority students and other students in their states enroll in system institutions and the rates at which the low-income and minority students who enter the institutions earn degrees. At least some of that data, particularly the college-going and graduation rates by income level, have not traditionally been reported before.

Each university system will craft its own plan to cut its gaps in half by 2015, and officials from the 19 systems – which as a group educate about 2 million students, about 12 percent of the nation’s total and about a third of all low-income and minority undergraduates at four-year colleges — will work together to share ideas about and attack some of the underlying issues that affect all of them: managing costs so that colleges have more funds to spend on things that directly help students succeed, with the help of Jane Wellman and the Delta Project on Postsecondary Costs; redesigning and improving introductory and remedial courses that can knock students off the track, aided by the National Center for Academic Transformation; aligning high school and college curriculums so more students are prepared to enter higher education, building on the work of the American Diploma Project; and bolstering need-based financial aid. The collaborative work will be conducted under the aegis of the system heads’ group and Education Trust, with analysis by their staffs, and will be financed by the Lumina and Gates Foundations.

The collective nature of the new effort, and the fact that the university systems will be laying out their records and committing to clearcut goals in a set period of time, are what distinguish it from previous ones, leaders of the initiative say.