By Zenia Henderson, Director of Member & Partner Engagement
The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the growing gaps in postsecondary enrollment and completion for students of color, first-generation-to-college students, and students from low-income backgrounds.
Prior to the pandemic, NCAN was working with 12 NCAN member organizations to address these gaps with the generous support of a Michael & Susan Dell Foundation grant. Over three years, these member organizations set out to expand their student success
services in their respective communities. What we learned was a pretty clear formula for scaling success services, which we’ve outlined in a new paper series.
The experiences of organizations that have successfully transitioned to supporting students in college and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic offer valuable lessons to others, as expanding access programs to serve students attending college can be a heavy
lift even in the best of times. Organizations seeking to expand their programs in this way must establish new approaches for engaging college students – who face different challenges than high school students – and monitoring their academic progress
and emotional well-being.
The featured organizations are:
Capital Partners for Education (Washington, D.C.)
DC Prep, PrepNext (Washington, D.C.)
Operation Jump Start (Long Beach, California)
Project GRAD Houston, Aspiring Young Adults (Houston, Texas)
Ready to Rise Tacoma, Degrees of Change (Tacoma, Washington)
Ann Coles, senior fellow, uAspire, authored the papers, which describe these organizations' experiences with:
Building the capacity to offer college success services.
Tracking and using data to measure their impact on student persistence.
Developing effective partnerships with higher education institutions.
The papers draw from information gathered through interviews with more than a dozen organization staff members and 20 students who benefited from their support.
There is also an overview paper offering a summary of all three of these topics as well as recommendations for undertaking similar efforts.
NCAN established the Success Replication project to help organizations ensure students they had served in high school complete postsecondary credentials. To achieve this goal, NCAN awarded two-year $45,000 grants to 12 organizations to build the capacity
to support students they had served in high school while attending college.
Organizations committed to increasing the number of students they supported in college and implementing lessons learned during their first year to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of their college success services during the second year. NCAN
supported these efforts by creating a learning community for organization staff to share information, explore common challenges, learn about best practices, and work toward sustainability of their success services beyond the grant period. NCAN also
provided organizations with professional development and technical assistance related to building partnerships with higher education institutions and tracking and using data to assess student progress and program outcomes.
NCAN is grateful to the many individuals who took the time to share their experiences and expertise for this paper series:
Maria Alvarez, Program Director, Operation Jump Start
Kelly Bay-Meyer, Chief Operations Officer, Degrees of Change
John Butler, Financial Aid Counselor, Montgomery College
Malisha Cooper-Suggs, Program Manager, Capital Partners for Education
DJ Crisostomo, Senior Director, Training and Northwest Partnerships, Ready to Rise, Degrees of Change
Diana Featherston, Director of Data and Analysis, Project GRAD Houston
Gerdon Jones, Manager of Student Success, Ready to Rise
Melissa Martinez, Director of GRADAdvising|GRAD Cafe, Project GRAD Houston
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