By Zenia Henderson, Director of Member & Partner Engagement
NCAN established the Success Replication Project, with the generous support of a Michael & Susan Dell Foundation grant, to help organizations ensure students they had served in high school complete postsecondary credentials. Over three years, 12 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 four-paper series.
Each paper offers a collection of case studies about several organizations that participated in the Success Replication Project. Ann Coles, senior fellow, uAspire, authored the papers.
This post is an excerpt from the first paper in the series, which outlines the steps five college access organizations
took to increase their capacity to serve college students. 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)
NCAN would like to thank all of the individuals who took the time to share their experiences and expertise for these publications. NCAN is grateful to the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation for their support of the Success Replication Project.
Since their inception in the 1950s, community-based college access programs have focused on preparing students from low-income and first-generation backgrounds for college and helping them complete the necessary steps to matriculate. Until about 10 years
ago, however, most programs had little, if any, involvement with students after high school. Instead, students had to navigate the unfamiliar world of college with scarce support from their postsecondary institutions.
Despite all their efforts, when college access programs heard from their alumni, they discovered many were struggling in college and lagging behind the degree completion rates of middle- and upper-income students. In 2017, only 13% of 24-year-olds from
the lowest income quartile and 20% from the second-lowest quartile had earned bachelor’s degrees, compared with 62% of students from the highest income quartile and 47% from the third-highest quartile. Concerned about their graduates not completing
college, some college access program leaders realized students needed help and thought their programs could offer support to students during their postsecondary studies, more widely known to the field as “college success services.”
Building the capacity of college access programs to serve students in college can be a heavy lift for several reasons. Offering college success services requires financial resources to support the additional staff needed to assist students. College students
confront more complex issues than the transactional tasks high school seniors must complete to matriculate, and so require advisers with different skills than those needed to support high school students. Maintaining personal connections with students
attending a variety of institutions, often outside the immediate geographic area, involves challenges not faced with high school students. These challenges require organizations to establish new approaches to engaging college students on an ongoing
basis and monitoring their academic progress and emotional well-being.
Despite these hurdles, a number of college access organizations have made successful transitions to supporting students in college.
Process for Expanding to Offer Success Services
Assessing Students’ Needs for Success Services
Identifying and understanding the challenges their students face in college served as a starting point for the organizations as they developed the capacity to help students persist from semester to semester and meet graduation requirements. Organizations
identified the needs of their high school graduates for support while in college in several ways. Using data from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC), which tracks students at 3,600 colleges nationally, the organizations determined the progress
of their high school graduates toward completing college and identified those who were no longer enrolled full time or had dropped out. The organizations also relied on anecdotal data from students who stayed in touch with staff after they finished
high school about their college experiences. In addition, Capital Partners for Education (CPE) and Operation Jump Start (OJS) heard from mentors who had maintained contact with students they had worked in high school.
Planning for Capacity Building
The executive directors led their organizations’ efforts to build the capacity to offer college success services with staff members at all levels contributing their experience and expertise. Along with NSC persistence and completion data, organizations
used data surfaced by direct service staff on students’ needs for support in college in developing their rationale for offering success services. The organizations’ boards of directors in all cases readily agreed to support the proposed expansion.
They viewed adding success services as important to ensuring that the high school students served by the organization would earn college credentials.
Developing a Logic Model
Every organization went through the process of constructing a logic model to guide its expansion efforts. A logic model maps out the strategies an organization will use to achieve its goals. It helps the organization clarify the specific outcomes it wants
to achieve and what resources it will need to do so. Often, organizations developing logic models will start with the outcomes they want students to achieve and map backward, describing the activities they will provide to help students take the steps
necessary to achieve each outcome.
Securing Resources to Support Expansion
All the organizations except PrepNext secured funds from external sources to build out and implement their college success models. OJS and Project GRAD Houston secured one- and two-year grants, respectively, to pilot their models. CPE received external
funding to engage a consulting firm to facilitate a four-day theory of change workshop to help staff and board members develop a well-defined model that would reliably deliver meaningful and measurable outcomes for students. In the case of Ready to
Rise, a foundation approached the CEO of its parent organization about his interest in replicating a success model he had developed for students attending small, private colleges. Subsequently, the foundation awarded the parent organization funding
to build, pilot, and scale this model over five years. PrepNext received support from the charter school network of which it is a component to facilitate its expansion efforts.
Read the full paper for sample logic models, recommendations for other organizations seeking to expand their programs in this way, and much more.
Email to a Friend