Boulder, Colorado 09/12/24: The Foundation for Student Success (FSS) is proud to announce the awarding of two grants totaling almost $1 million to two organizations to support their work in facilitating campus cultural transformation to eliminate equity gaps for Black, Hispanic, and American Indian students and assure their access and success in US higher education institutions. FSS has determined that the most effective way to advance its mission is to complete its work, sunset the Foundation, and underwrite the powerful work by these two organizations, which were chosen by the Board of Directors through an application and interview process.
The grants are awarded to the Aspen Institute College Excellence Program and Excelencia in Education.
The Aspen Institute College Excellence Program works to advance the practices, policies, and leadership of community colleges and four-year institutions across the United States so that more students succeed during college and after graduation.
Excelencia in Education works to tap the talents of the Latino community by promoting student achievement, advancing evidence-based practices, and informing educational policies that can serve Latino, and all, students more intentionally.
These organizations have the potential to reach millions of underrepresented students through their networks of institutions of higher education, their innovative instructional materials, and their training workshops and seminars. Each of these grantees is committed to the success of underrepresented students. The Foundation of Student Success is proud to support these organizations to advance FSS’s mission to support postsecondary institutions to achieve greater student success and reduce equity gaps through comprehensive campus culture-change strategies.
The Foundation for Student Success (FSS) was founded in 2016 as the result of the acquisition of the nonprofit Predictive Analytics Reporting (PAR) Framework sale to a for-profit company. FSS was established as a not-for-profit organization with an independent board of directors. Since its founding, FSS has conducted extensive research with 28 colleges and universities to codify what leaders can do to reduce and/or eliminate equity gaps among Black, Hispanic and American Indian students. Part of that research also explored how those actions could be effectively shared with other campuses.
In 2023, the National Science Foundation awarded the National Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS), which hosts FSS, the funding to produce the tools that emerged from the FSS research. These self-assessment tools focus on four levers: 1) Data collection, analysis and use; 2) Effective institution-wide communication and engagement; 3) Hiring strategies and personnel policies; and 4) Audit of institution and state policies and practices to identify those that perpetuate lower student achievement. The tools were refined with the help of two groups of campus presidents from both community colleges and universities. These self-assessment tools are available as Open Education Resources.
Foundation for Student Success Self-Assessment Tool Levers for the four resources created.
The Foundation for Student Success’s research materials, reports and self-assessment tools will be available on the NCHEMS website. For questions related to the self-assessment tools, please contact Sally Johnstone (Sally@nchems.org), FSS executive director and NCHEMS president emerita.
