Navigating the path to a certificate or degree can be difficult and costly, especially for students who face challenges accessing academic and financial support. For too many, the road ends before graduation.
Keeping students on the path to their goals requires support for the whole student. This includes advising that addresses students’ academic, financial, and other issues; credit transfer that helps students change institutions without losing momentum, and emergency aid that prevents unplanned expenses from derailing a student’s journey.
All students stay on the path to a certificate or degree, and no student – especially students from low-income backgrounds, first-generation students, and students of color – is pushed off their path because of lack of access to quality advising, emergency expenses, or credit transfer barriers.
Redesigning student advising is a cross-campus job that requires bridging different policies, practices, data sources, and even cultures. The student transfer process is marked by a complex patchwork of policies and practices and there has historically been resistance to harmonizing those policies and practices to help students. Similarly, many emergency aid programs face hurdles in effectively and efficiently delivering aid to the students who need it most, as well as regulatory guidance that is often confusing or incomplete.
1) Increase the number of colleges and universities adopting evidence-backed advising models at scale. 2) Expand the number of states and college and university systems adopting and implementing comprehensive credit transfer agreements; promote institutional adoption of “best practice” principles for administering transfer. 3) Increase the number of colleges and universities operating emergency aid programs, and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of distributing emergency aid funds to students.
When implemented at scale, holistic advising strategies will help more students stay on the path to their educational goals, specifically increasing retention and completion rates and reducing attrition rates, shortening time to degree, and cutting time and credits lost in transfer. This will significantly boost efforts to improve outcomes by race, ethnicity, and income.
Focus Area Timeline
The push to strengthen student pathways began with a focus on technology tools connecting students with critical information about their progress. It has evolved to include improvements in the practice of advising and to make connections across the campus to focus on the needs of the whole student.
Phase I (2013-2015)
This phase featured investments in technology to provide more timely information to students about their academic paths and potential barriers to them, led by the launch of the foundation’s Integrated Planning and Advising for Student Success (iPASS) initiative.
Our investments in this area focus on connecting colleges and universities with the best available knowledge and tools for implementing a comprehensive student advising strategy, one that includes stronger emergency aid and credit transfer policies and practices.
Implementing and Scaling Advising Redesign
Support partners in providing direct assistance for implementing and scaling advising redesign; continue to build a knowledge base on effective policies and practices.
Building Comprehensive Policies and Principles
Build demand and support for adoption of comprehensive state- and system-level policies and principles of best practice at the campus level.
Boosting Partner Capacity
Boost partner capacity to support institutions implementing and improving their emergency aid programs; expand knowledge base about effective aid design and delivery.
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