Committed to a Student-Ready
System of Higher Education
Every student
can succeed.
Our core belief is that every student can succeed - in the right structures, with the right support. We help institutions transform to ensure students do.
We specifically focus on the success of Black, Latinx, Indigenous, poverty-affected, and older students. Our partners in serving these students include community colleges, minority-serving institutions, and four-year open-access institutions, as well as the system offices, nonprofits, and foundations that support them.
College-ready
or student-ready?
We believe students signal they are college-ready when they apply, and institutions agree when they admit them.
To achieve equitable outcomes for diverse students with complex lives, institutions must focus instead on whether they themselves are student-ready, with the structures and supports to ensure every student can succeed.
BELIEVE
A student-ready postsecondary institution believes it has an obligation to provide the right structures and supports to help every student succeed.
PRIORITIZE
It sets highly visible goals rooted in equitable student success, mobilizes the entire institution to work toward these goals, and dedicates the resources and capacity to achieve them.
EVOLVE
It examines its structures and supports from a diverse student perspective, then transforms to ensure an experience that leads to graduation and a fulfilling career.
SUSTAIN
It continuously monitors its effectiveness and commits to continued transformation to serve an ever-changing student population.
OUR APPROACH
We provide customized, hands-on technical assistance and capacity support to institutions committed to student-ready transformation.
Our work begins with inquiry and discovery - engaging students historically marginalized, centering their lived experiences, and pinpointing the barriers to their success. We review policy and process to identify how such barriers are perpetuated. We then recommend a tailored set of priorities based on this institutional context. Once priorities are set, we contribute expertise and capacity to efforts to enact sustainable structural change.