Project Overview

Summary

This project will seek to improve retention, and thereby degree completion, by making programmatic interventions that mark a larger culture shift.  The work of this project will challenge the inherited, elitist idea that “liberal arts” education at private four-year schools is divorced from career-planning, and that college/university responsibility stops at the transmission of knowledge and does not include responsibility for readiness to apply that knowledge to economically useful work beyond college.  We know that low-income students do not have the same career support and entryways that are available to more economically privileged students.  If colleges do not accept responsibility to address this need, the systemic inequity will be perpetuated.  Yes We Must Coalition schools are ready to change this harmful culture with strategies that have worked in the community college sector.   There is evidence from the community college sector that guided pathways and supports for career-readiness keep more students on track to graduation and economic mobility. This project will test if strategies focused on career preparation and career pathways that have been productive for community college students will improve retention for students from low-income backgrounds within four-year programs at private colleges and universities.

Grant Details

Addressing Inequity in College Retention of Low-Income Students:

Collaboratively Creating Pathways to Careers in Four-Year Degree Programs

A Proposal to Ascendium Education Group from the Yes We Must Coalition

1.     What problem(s) is the proposed project seeking to solve?

The promise of higher education in American has been to be a ladder for economic and social mobility.  However, that has not been true for low-income people for more than 40 years (“Indicators of Higher Education Equity in the United States: 2022 Historical Trend Report,” The Pell Institute).  According to the Pell Institute, the estimated bachelor’s degree attainment rates in 2020 were almost four times higher for students from families in the highest versus the lowest quartiles of income.  Only 14% of those from the lowest income quartile completed a bachelor’s degree within six years of enrolling.  Clearly, retention of students to degree and preparation for entry into a well-paid job are equity issues which need focused attention.

Aiming at changing the structural inequity among income groups so that the “ladder” works for everyone, this project seeks to improve the currently low retention rate for low-income students enrolled in specific programs at Yes We Must Coalition (YWMC) member schools.  The YWMC is composed of 39 non-profit, private colleges and universities where the undergraduate enrollment is 50% or more Pell-eligible.  This sector of higher education is dedicated by mission, most often by founding principles, to serve those who are most in need of economic mobility to lift themselves and their families from poverty.  These schools are diverse in many ways.  About half are located in rural/town locations; two-thirds have some religious affiliation; and there are HBCUs, MSIs, PSIs, HSIs and women’s colleges.  About 40% have a total undergraduate enrollment of under 1000, and students of color make up 60% of enrollment.  Member schools are united by a commitment to identifying and removing barriers in the traditional structures, processes, and policies of higher education in order to best serve learners who are from low-income backgrounds. 

Specifically, this project will seek to improve retention, and thereby degree completion, by making programmatic interventions that mark a larger culture shift.  The work of this project will challenge the inherited, elitist idea that “liberal arts” education at private four-year schools is divorced from career-planning, and that college/university responsibility stops at the transmission of knowledge and does not include responsibility for readiness to apply that knowledge to economically useful work beyond college.  We know that low-income students do not have the same career support and entryways that are available to more economically privileged students.  If colleges do not accept responsibility to address this need, the systemic inequity will be perpetuated.  Yes We Must Coalition schools are ready to change this harmful culture with strategies that have worked in the community college sector.   There is evidence from the community college sector that guided pathways and supports for career-readiness keep more students on track to graduation and economic mobility. This project will test if strategies focused on career preparation and career pathways that have been productive for community college students will improve retention for students from low-income backgrounds within four-year programs at private colleges and universities.

While member schools are committed to and have succeeded at enrolling a significant number (50% or more) of low-income students, the schools are frustrated that enrolled students do not persist to graduation, especially in programs they have selected to target for this project.  Attrition of students from poverty at significantly higher rates than more affluent students experience is an obvious sign that change is needed.  Students’ context of poverty makes a clear pathway to economic mobility all the more essential.  For students who are constantly coping with economic instability for themselves and their families, the college experience needs to be intentionally grounded in visible, practical connections between knowledge, skills, and experiences that lead to the promise of economic mobility through career-readiness.  For those pursuing a bachelor’s degree the relevance of a foundation of liberal education to economic well-being and mobility in the labor force needs to be clear.  Our premise is that redesigned curricular and co-curricular programs that unify liberal arts learning and career-preparedness through explicit pathways will result in improved student retention, the necessary first step in helping students reach the career opportunities and earning power that comes with a bachelor’s degree.

To gauge interest and readiness to participate in this project, we put out a call to all of the 39 YWMC member presidents and vpaas/provosts, briefly describing the goals of the project and asking for identification of one or two programs they would target for redesign, and for any data/impressions they had about a relationship between attrition and a lack of embedded career-readiness preparation.  Ten schools responded with enthusiasm in the short timeframe requested.  Of the ten, four are rural/town, the rest urban/suburban.  We can vouch for strong leadership at nine of the schools with a new administration at the tenth; in all cases, support is at the highest level.  All are familiar with the evidence that career-focused education is necessary for the economic mobility they seek for their students.  We anticipate that ten member schools, all BA degree-granting and representing the diversity of the Coalition, will be involved with this project as an inaugural group; their outputs and learning can then be extended to broader implementation by the entire membership.

2.     Describe how the proposed project plans to address the problem(s) identified in question one. What activities does your organization (and any partners) plan to accomplish under this grant? What will be the direct products, tools and services (outputs) generated by the proposed activities?

While there is widespread recognition that attrition is a problem for both students and the institution, to date most efforts to deal with the problem have focused on the important area of “student support”.  Wrap-around student services that are designed to respond to the academic, emotional, and financial needs of students from poverty are incredibly important for student success.  However, within four-year colleges and universities, not much attention has been paid to the lack of intentional preparation of students for economic mobility as a cause of attrition, specifically the connection between the academic course of study and that ultimate goal of economic mobility.  This proposal is focused on that area of the student experience.  It has never been at the core of the mission nor the perceived responsibility of four-year institutions to connect the content of the curriculum with employment.  Faculty, in particular, have not been prepared by graduate study nor expected by the colleges and universities that hire them, to take responsibility for making that connection.  This is the significant culture shift we seek to help institutions make.

Fundamentally, participants from YWMC schools recognize the problem of attrition – for the students who lose the potential economic mobility while almost certainly incurring debt when they drop out, and for the institution when students are not retained to complete degrees.  For the most part, along with the rest of the four-year college sector, YWMC schools have not paid attention to the curriculum as a contributing cause of attrition.  Given their small size and stretched resources, YWMC schools are not equipped individually to take on the work of re-orienting the curriculum without outside support.  This project will help teams imagine the possibilities and give them the tools and time to redesign the four-year experience in order to test our hypothesis that students will be retained at greater rates if the college experience is authentically connected with employment after college.  Because four-year private colleges are not historically oriented to providing clear career preparation as an articulated outcome, the project will require extensive faculty and staff development to make this culture shift.  Cross-functional teams will likely include faculty and academic leaders, as well as student life, career, institutional research, and community outreach staff, working with the support of a campus president or provost.

At the beginning of the project, we will measure the felt need for career pathways in and out of the curriculum, a sense of whose responsibility it is to create these pathways, and what the obstacles are specifically to linking curriculum with career pathways.  Our aim will be to document a shift at the end of the project as an example of the culture shift that might lead to increased retention.  We believe the focus of our partner, Sova, on networked continuous improvement, strengthened by cross-institutional collaboration, will accelerate the pace and improve the quality of the changes each institution will engage with throughout the grant period and beyond. 

This project will enlist a team of administrators, faculty, and staff at each participating YWMC member school to redesign one or two academic programs of study that currently have low retention of majors.  The redesign, which will involve all four years of college experience, will intentionally connect the program(s) to career opportunities.  In order to do this, schools need regional labor market data, connections to regional employers, input from students, and integrated curricular and co-curricular learning that encourages students to see persistence to completion of the bachelor’s degree as the pathway to economic mobility.  This project seeks to institutionalize each of these components as leading indicators of the changes necessary to positively impact retention.   Not only will campus teams work together, they will also work collaboratively with the team members of the other YWMC colleges engaged in the project.  The key output of the project will be the redesigned program curriculum at each school, including foundational years and major requirements and revised co-curriculum; and, for each school, the development of an ongoing capacity to remain attuned to labor market data and trends will be established. In addition, each school wil prepare to implement at least one new strategy that enables career pathways for all students.

Early in the project, focus groups of students and alumnae from the program(s) to be redesigned on each campus will be conducted by trained facilitators.  We will tap the experience of and suggestions from current and former students about the connection between their major program and the outcome or perceived outcome of economic mobility.  Both the Yes We Must Coalition and Sova have experience with the design, implementation and analysis of focus group data.  The grouped findings will be available for everyone to learn from and apply, and individual school-level reports will be made available to participating schools.  These data will be integrated into both of the primary learning activities of the project, that is, the Year One Institute and the Year Two Workshops, described below. 

This three-year project will involve teams working as a networked improvement community in virtual (and in-person when appropriate) convenings and with assignments that broaden their perspective of the responsibility of four-year colleges and universities to educate students out of poverty and to teach them how to tap into the potential of data, employer partnerships, and innovative practices to redesign the college experience for students.  Doing this as a shared experience with other similar schools will deepen the commitment and creativity that teams bring to the project.

Year One Institute:  Across the first year of the project, all team members will attend foundational virtual convenings that move them from the problem of attrition of low-income learners to the solution of creating integrated career preparation across the four-year curriculum and co-curriculum.  We will begin with a recognition of the challenge, especially for faculty, of making this shift and the resources available to help.   The grant partners, YWMC, Jobs for the Future, Sova and the participating schools will decide collaboratively on more specific parts of the process for building collaboration, program redesign and institutional cultural shifts.   Jobs for the Future (JFF) will design and deliver many of the labor market and strategy sessions; Sova will help to identify and enlist other experts with experience in implementing pathways at scale, and the Yes We Must Coalition staff will identify exemplars among YWMC members to participate with peers in identifying and developing strategies for change that enable intentional pathways to economic mobility.  focus.  Teams will be given assignments throughout the year to make the new knowledge they are exposed to relevant and practically applicable to their programs and campuses. Each campus team will include a “data champion” (since IR staff is often non-existent at these under-resourced schools) who will lead data identification, collection, and analysis learning as JFF provides individual and Data Champion Community of Practice training and support throughout the project.  Sova will also provide data support for formative evaluation and insights as part of their continuous improvement oversight.

Year Two Workshops:  Across the second year of the project, all team members will attend virtual workshops that introduce them to innovative practices and strategies that help students navigate a career pathway.  These workshops will be based on a networked improvement community approach and will be led by national experts along with YWMC member school exemplars (who may or may not be among the project participants).  Workshops will present models and ask participants to explore workability on their campuses.  Sova will help to identify and enlist experts, help to design the workshops, and support their delivery.  With consideration of learnings from Year One – market data, student data, insights from regional employers, etc. – participants will be asked to choose one or two enabling institutional strategies to support a curricular and co-curricular career-integrated pathway for the one or two curricular programs their school will redesign.  Strategies might include: using the YWMC online consortium to expand available courses and/or incorporating microcredentials; developing paid internships and other earn-as-you-learn opportunities; using Meta Major curricular design in the foundational years; developing robust credit for prior learning and competency-based credits; developing career-relevant workplace learning; and utilizing skills mapping.  At the end of Year Two, schools will have explored how to connect the learnings from labor market data, from employers, from students, and from Year Two Workshop strategies to develop a plan for extensive program redesign work in Year Three.

Year Three Communities of Practice:  In Year Three, schools will decide on which one or two enabling strategies to support pathways they will choose to enhance the redesign of their target program(s). Several cross-campus Communities of Practice (CoPs) will be formed.  Those implementing the same strategies will participate in a CoP and there will also be CoPs for those working to redesign the same program areas.  These cross-institutional CoPs will be facilitated by leaders with expertise who will be identified and enlisted by Sova and JFF.   Throughout Year Three, the plan for the work at each school will be monitored by staff from Sova and the Yes We Must Coalition.  At the end of Year Three, curricular and co-curricular redesign work and planning for the introduction of a new enabling startegy will be well underway.

3.     Ascendium ultimately seeks to contribute to the following goal: more learners from low-income backgrounds efficiently earn degrees and credentials in postsecondary education and workforce training that improve their labor market success and socioeconomic mobility.
As a funder of systemic change, we appreciate that only some funded projects, for example those involving direct services or institutional reform, may directly contribute to improved learner outcomes during the grant period. Other projects seek to change upstream outcomes, like improving institutional policies, that are important precursors to improving learner outcomes over time. Ascendium funds both types of projects.
What are the changes in systems, organizations or individuals (outcomes) that the proposed project aims to contribute? This may include, but is not limited to: changing the knowledge, attitude and behavior of specific actors (e.g., college presidents, postsecondary staff, students); changing institutional policies and practices; or changing resource flows and the distribution of decision-making power. At a high level, how will your organization know whether the proposed work is contributing to these outcomes?

Our assumption is that structural changes in degree program content and requirements, supported by enabling campus-wide strategies that create pathways to careers available regionally, will lead to greater retention of students from low-income circumstances in four-year college programs.   Within the timeline of this project, faculty and staff will be prepared for and will take significant steps to accomplish the necessary programmatic and institutional changes.  Specifically,

·   cross-campus teams, with a particular focus on mid-level leaders with the support of senior leaders, will understand and practically embrace the need for a redesign of curriculum to intentionally connect it with economic mobility outcomes for students;

·   campus teams will learn continuous improvement approaches (with change management principles being central) to executing their individual work in collaboration with peers across the network;

·   faculty and staff will increase their knowledge of labor market data sources and trends in their regions;

·   institutional data champions at each college will be enabled to continue to collect and analyze labor market data after the end of the project; 

·   faculty and staff will increase their knowledge of models of curricular and co-curricular campus-wide enabling strategies to support programmatic changes that make career-preparation central to the college experience and will select up to two strategies to implement on their campus;

·   institutions will explore ways to develop collaborative relationships with regional employers to enhance the redesign of programs. 

Given the ambitious nature of these goals, we will place a special focus on change management and leveraging the collective learning of the network to continuously improve retention across our participating institutions. In addition, we will lay a firm foundation for sustainable support through the preparation of data champions and the infrastructure they need to continue to use labor market analysis to inform program decisions.

We will develop a timeline for assessing formative results of each year of activity and cumulatively at the end of the project.   The bottom-line assessment will be the progress made on revised program curriculum and the adoption of enabling across campus strategies to support an emphasis on economic mobility outcomes for students.

4.     What evidence supports that the proposed project has the potential to solve the identified problem(s) and contribute to the identified outcomes? Evidence can come from a variety of sources (e.g., formal evaluations, internal monitoring or performance measurement, personal/professional experience) and demonstrates different strengths and weaknesses. How strong is the existing evidence, and what’s not yet known about the effectiveness of the proposed solution(s)?

Most of the work to develop integrated curricular and co-curricular career-readiness approaches at the postsecondary level has been done in the community college context.  Many of these efforts have involved Jobs for the Future in the work.  The literature does not make the case for a silver-bullet approach but rather for the inclusion of career pathways as part of a holistic approach to student learning.  Examples include: 

·   the CUNY Ask-Connect-Inspire-Plan (ACIP) https://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/media/k2/attachments/ask-connect-inspire-plan-onboarding.pdf

·   the Students Accelerating in Learning (SAIL) program at Lorraine County Community College https://socialfinance.org/wp-content/uploads/2019_SAILing-to-Graduation_White-Paper-1.pdf

·   and the Guttman Community College approach to “Putting Vocation at the Center of the Curriculum” https://jfforg-prod-new.s3.amazonaws.com/media/documents/Vocation_at_Center_of_Curriculum_FINAL.pdf.

These are all widely cited models that have been successful in the community college sector.  All rely on regional labor market information, input from employers, and close advising by trained faculty and staff.  The most compelling model from a four-year school comes from the public sector in Georgia State University’s “College to Career” Program (https://collegetocareer.gsu.edu/collegetocareer/about/).

In addition, we have anecdotal evidence from the professionals at Yes We Must Coalition member schools based on both internal surveys/interviews and professional consultants that have advised schools of the need to connect learning to career preparation in order to attract and retain more students, especially those from low-income backgrounds.  Some of the comments about the need for this work from YWMC schools include:

·   “Programs with the weakest job outcomes have the lowest retention.”

·   “We are losing students due to a lack of explicit relationship to career links.”

·   “We have a strategic emphasis on career pathways but due to a very rural location, we do not have the resources and partnerships we need to do so.” 

·   “Students need to see career objectives in the classroom.” 

·   “Students leave when they don’t see jobs at the end of college.”

·   “Students are career pragmatists so academic pathways must respond to that.”

When we asked the ten schools that responded to the invitation to participate in this project to select one or two programs for redesign, four identified four or more programs.  Here are the programs identified in order of number of mentions: psychology (5), biology (3), business (3), sociology (2), and criminal justice (2).  All ten schools mentioned at least one of these fields.  This common identification of programs would allow good cross-institutional fertilization of ideas and collaboration on content.  The five programs identified by multiple schools tend to be popular undergraduate programs at most YWMC schools, so increasing retention and obtaining good economic outcomes for graduates would positively impact overall institutional retention.  These are also fields that have wide career applicability and having input from employers to help connect learning to career skills and opportunities will be essential.   The schools would then be able to select one other program for focus.  All schools will collaborate on foundational year strategies, and we will group those with discipline similarity (i.e., health fields, sciences, humanities) for closer work together.

We do not yet know if or how the models from the community college sector can be adapted by poorly-resourced, small, private colleges that serve significant numbers of Pell-eligible students.  The intent of this project is to learn from the Yes We Must Coalition member schools that will create models that work to retain four-year bachelor’s degree-seeking students in order to leverage these learnings for scaled, equitable impact.

5.     If the proposed project aims to directly cause or contribute to improvements in learner outcome(s) during the proposed grant period, select the specific outcome(s) that apply.

Not Applicable

 5a. Thank you for indicating that the proposed project does not anticipate directly affecting learner outcomes during the grant period. We routinely invest in these types of projects. Help us understand, at a high level, the connection between the proposed project and the learner-focused goal articulated in question three.

The primary focus is not on directly impacting learners during the life of the grant.  The aim is to change the systems in which students learn in order to generate greater retention of students.  The impact will be on the structure and content of the educational experience, redesigned to provide students with continuity and connections between the learning they attain throughout curricular and co-curricular experiences and their need for economic mobility.   The proposed project enables the necessary changes which we hypothesize will directly impact the retention of low-income learners when implemented. 

6.The previous questions, separately, have asked you to describe parts of the proposed project’s theory of change, or the cause-and-effect logic by which your organization’s efforts will convert the identified social problem into the desired social change. In this question, provide a high-level summary of your proposed project that effectively weaves together those discrete parts. If your organization has a visual representation of the project’s theory of change (or logic model), this can be uploaded as an attachment. This attachment is optional.

We hypothesize that students from low-income backgrounds have the same learning needs and the same real financial needs no matter what type of higher education institution they attend – two-year or four-year, public or private -- and that intentional career pathways will help to retain them in four-year degree programs as effectively as in two-year programs. Well-designed, integrated pathways to careers will increase retention of low-income students in four-year programs because students are able to connect their academic course of study and co-curricular opportunities to the outcome of their economic mobility, arguably the reason why they are investing in a college education.  This exploratory project, conducted by a range of YWMC member schools working collaboratively, will accomplish the first steps in the process of making that change by identifying and using labor market knowledge and tools, cultivating relationships with employers, gaining exposure to a variety of innovative strategies and adapting them for their use, and by being granted the time and financial support necessary for faculty and staff to make changes to selected four-year programs and co-curricular experiences.   

7. Describe how you plan to meet the organizational capacity and expertise requirements for successful project implementation, including existing or new personnel that will contribute to the proposed project’s activities and outputs. If there are gaps in your organization’s expertise or competencies relative to the proposed project’s goals, outputs and audiences, describe how you plan to fill those gaps. Note any key partners you plan to engage in the proposed project to complement your existing organizational expertise and what role(s) those partners will play in relation to the proposed project’s goals.

The schools bring strengths to the project that unite them and will help to move the work forward: they are voluntarily committed to the Yes We Must Coalition network and to collaboration with like-minded institutions; they are already intentionally serving high percentages of students from poverty and have an appreciation for the structural barriers their students face; their campus culture is personal and student-centered; they value the connection between general education and liberal-learning and the contribution of liberal learning to the essential (aka soft) skills often cited as critical to success by employers; their small size allows nimble curriculum changes to meet changing needs and the inclusion of all or nearly all faculty and staff in professional development.

The principals in YWMC are Ann Landis, Program Manager, and Gloria Nemerowicz, President and founder.  Each holds a PhD (Humanities and Sociology, respectively) and each has served as faculty and in a number of academic administrative roles including, president, provost and dean.  As founder of YWMC, Gloria has been in her role for 11 years, Ann came to her role six years ago after serving as provost at a founding YWMC school.   The expertise of YWMC staff is grounded in knowledge of and experience with the structural inequity in American higher education and the needs of students from poverty.  Because they are from the academic world, Ann and Gloria have obtained the trust and confidence of the membership.   YWMC has managed substantial multi-institutional grants, facilitated collaborations across institutions, conducted qualitative and quantitative research, and taken on advocacy roles for low-income students and the institutions that serve them. YWMC is well positioned to function as the backbone at each stage of this project, capitalizing on the strong relationships already established with the leadership of participating schools.  Gloria and Ann will oversee all parts of the project, stimulating and organizing collaboration among participating schools and assuming overall project management and budgetary responsibility.  They will provide guidance to partners and experts, oversee formative and summative assessment and dissemination efforts.  Ann and Gloria will steer the partners through the work and provide the context to partners for working with YWMC schools.

The work will be enriched by partnerships with Jobs for the Future (JFF) and with Sova.  Each will bring a wealth of expertise that YWMC does not have.  We have consulted with both organizations and they are enthusiastic about being part of the project.

Sova describes itself fittingly: “Driven by a commitment to genuine upward mobility through higher education, we support student-focused innovation on behalf of better and more equitable outcomes for today’s learners.”  Sova has the experience and network to supplement the capacity of YWMC to do the following:

·   design, implement and support a YWMC networked improvement community to drive progress during and beyond the grant period;

·   provide overall project management support throughout the life of the grant;

·   peform a formative evaluation to gather actionable feedback for the improvement of YWMC efforts;

·   consult with Yes We Must Coalition staff on an on-going basis to monitor and adjust project activities;

·   find experts to contribute to the content of the Institute, the Workshops and the Communities of Practice;

·   help to identify and foster shared work across the campuses;

·   help to build out individual campus plans and monitor their progress;

·   provide a half-time project manager to create and monitor a grants activites timeline.

JFF “drives transformation of the American workforce and education systems to achieve equitable economic advancement for all.”  They will bring to this project expertise in acquiring and analyzing regional labor market data that neither YWMC nor our member schools have.  We will look to JFF to deliver the following:

·   design and delivery of the Year One Institute on integrated career preparation in collaboration with Sova and YWMC;

·   training and support for “data champions” on individual campuses to leave them prepared to access and use labor market data;

·   facilitate a Community of Practice for data champions;

·   facilitate building relationships with regional employers;

·   review and advise on individual campus plans; 

·   provide consultation with individual campuses as necessary.

In Year One, JFF will design and deliver an Institute on the application of labor market information and design considerations for academic programs. This Institute will be designed as four 90-minute sessions including pre-exercises, discussions, and resources, and will highlight best practices from the field. If needed, JFF can pull relevant data from subscription-based services such as Lightcast to augment the tools that colleges already have access to. Early sessions will provide a grounding in the fundamentals of using labor market information to improve equitable economic advancement and employment outcomes of workers and learners, including qualitative and quantitative sources.  The sessions will emphasize the importance of incorporating employment and wage outcomes alongside credential attainment and will include recommendations to colleges based on best practices nationally.  During subsequent sessions, participants will engage in structured exercises to practice applying data to their own contexts.  Participants will engage in structured exercises to practice applying the data to their own contexts and will learn how to leverage labor market information to understand the needs of local employers. The Institute will be designed for a broad set of stakeholders including Institutional Research staff, faculty, deans/department leadership, and advisors. Later sessions may include the opportunity to engage external partners such as Chambers of Commerce or Workforce Boards.

In the second half of Year One, JFF will also support participating colleges in building their capacity to engage regularly with labor market information. Colleges will be asked to identify data champions who will meet one-on-one with JFF staff to create a customized plan for regularly accessing and sharing labor market information. These virtual consultation sessions will examine current college capacity, available data sources, and mechanisms for engaging college leadership and staff in examining data. Data Champions will meet with JFF staff quarterly for the remainder of the project to share best practices and troubleshoot challenges.

In Year Two, JFF will develop workshops on the following topics:

·   work-based learning models that build skills and professional networks;

·   skills mapping and curriculum alignment to prepare graduates for in-demand careers;

·   embedding career exploration throughout the program of study;

·   enabling institutional strategies to support career pathways.

Each workshop will provide an overview of the approach, highlight exemplars from the Yes We Must Coalition network as well as other colleges, and include time for colleges to assess how these models could be applied to their unique context. The purpose of the workshops is to help colleges assess which strategies to focus on in Year Three of the project. The workshops will include relevant evidence on why the strategies are impactful and  will design considerations for successful implementation. Conversations with the JFF team will assist colleges in identifying momentum and areas of alignment at their institutions.

In Year Three, JFF will support one or two communities of practice based on the models selected by participating colleges. This support will include monthly calls with colleges to highlight progress and address emerging challenges. Formats for these calls could include peer consultancies, topical discussions, presentations from external practitioner experts, or peer sharing. Between monthly calls, JFF will share relevant resources, respond to college questions, and, if desired, facilitate asynchronous discussion.

 8.Our LOI questions requested your proposed project’s activities, outputs and outcomes. Using the Developing High Quality Performance Measures Guide and Performance Measures Form, prioritize the best signals of meaningful progress and success and convert these into your grant’s proposed key performance measures by adding targets (i.e., how much? by when?) and further refining your measurement plan (i.e., how will you know?). These will become the cornerstone for future grant reporting.

Performance Indicators

Period One (June 2023 – May 2024)

By August 2023, the participating institutions will be identified and will have executed an MOU for project participation including identification of the programs to be redesigned.

By September 2023, Data Champions will be identified for 80% of the participating schools.

By May 2024, 70% of the team participants will indicate, through a survey, an understanding of the need to build career pathways in four-year curricular programs in order to retain students from low-income backgrounds.

By May 2024, 70% of the team participants will demonstrate, through a survey, knowledge of each of the following and will assess the usefulness of each to the work of program redesign:

a) the use of labor market data and analysis;

b) how to cultivate productive relationships with regional employers;

c) how to use the co-curriculum to further career preparation; and

d) approaches to streamlining the curriculum.

By May 2024, 80% of the school teams will have been interviewed to document their individual progress toward program redesign.

Period Two (June 2024 – May 2025)

By May 2025, 80% of teams will have developed a preliminary plan for program redesign.

By May 2025, 70% of participating schools will have selected one campus-wide career pathway enabling strategy to develop for implementation at their school.

By May 2025, 80% of the school team members will be active participants in cross-institution Communities of Practice.

By May 2025, Data Champions will demonstrate, through interviews, their ability to obtain and understand regional labor market data.

By May 2025, 80% of team members will demonstrate through surveys  knowledge about at least four institutional strategies that enable career pathways in academic programs and they will assess the value of each strategy to their own campus.

By May 2025, 80% of the participating school teams will have been interviewed about their progress toward program redesign and enabling strategy adoption.

Period Three (June 2025 – May 2026)

By May 2026, 90% of teams will have created the structure for their specific program redesign.

By May 2026, 70% of teams will be ready for institutional implementation of at least one enabling, campus-wide strategy.

By May 2026, 80% of teams will have developed a functional role description for the on-going role of Data Champion on their campus.

By May 2026, at least 70% of teams and campus leaders will report through surveys and interviews that the campus culture is receptive to the building of career pathways in more program areas.

By May 2026, a final set of short case studies from interviews with the participating schools will be collected for further analysis of the process of change to disseminate to others.

9. While performance measures are core to our evaluative approach, we recognize that this approach may not answer all the questions that your organization and we have about the proposed project. If your organization has additional plans for a formative or summative evaluation conducted by internal staff or by an external third party, share those plans here. Describe the core evaluation or learning questions, methods and analysis plan, data sources and collection and results reporting and dissemination.
If you identified that the proposed grant intends to improve learner-level outcomes during the grant period (question five), provide more information about your evaluation plans specific to learners. For example, will you disaggregate results by subpopulations, such as by low-income status, race/ethnicity, first-generation status, rural community membership, currently incarcerated status and/or veteran status?

While our ultimate aim is to impact student level outcomes and increase student retention to completion of degree, the work of this grant is to build the capacity of the Yes We Must Coalition network of institutions to fully understand the needs of their students for clear pathways to economic mobility and to apply that understanding to programmatic and system changes on their respective campuses. For this purpose, we will create a thoughtful set of leading indicators that will help us gauge momentum toward the ultimate goal of increasing retention in targeted programs. These leading indicators will allow us to pay close attention to the institutional shifts required to improve student retention.  The project manager will develop a timeline of activities and will document progress as well as the need for adjustments.  We will stay closely connected with school teams to obtain their formative feedback as the project progresses and will survey the team members after the Institute session, workshop sessions and community of practice discussions.  We will be assessing both their acquisition of knowledge and their evaluation of the usefulness of the knowledge for the changes that they are making.  In addition, we will interview team members to gain feedback on the progress being made at the end of each grant period.  These interviews will form the basis of case studies for distillation of key lessons learned that can be shared with the larger Yes We Must Coalition network and beyond.

 10. Describe in greater detail how you’ll communicate about your project to audiences external to your proposed project. With whom will you share project progress, successes and lessons learned? How will you share progress and to what end? Ascendium appreciates a communication plan that identifies specific target audience(s) and appropriately calibrates the communication goals to the project. For some proposed projects, like research grants, this may be an opportunity to deepen answers provided in questions two and three.

For this project, we will follow the communication plan used for all Yes We Must Coalition collaborative projects which capitalizes on the shared interest of an already-identified network of like-minded colleges and universities.  Grantee schools will periodically share information in webinars and virtual collaborative discussions about their goals, progress, success, and lessons learned with the other 35 colleges and universities that are members of the Coalition.  In addition, we will share case studies and/or a composite summary of the progress, challenges, and outcomes of the journey to institutional change.  The purpose of communications about collaborative projects is to stimulate thinking and share resources for similar work on YWMC campuses outside the project group. Information will also be shared with the group of more than 1000 “Friends of Yes We Must,” which consists largely of individuals at colleges and universities and organizations that do not meet the requirements for membership in the Coalition, but do support the goal of increasing college success for learners from low-income backgrounds.   In addition, we will rely on our partners, Jobs for the Future and Sova, to identify opportunities and help us utilize their communication networks to let others know about the work that is going on through the grant and to participate in forums to discuss progress and challenges.  This dissemination will allow the work to become part of a broader national network.

11. Identify any risks you anticipate to the successful design, funding and implementation of the proposed project and your ability to achieve the intended outputs and outcomes. Ascendium appreciates candid and pragmatic reflections on risk so that we may, as appropriate, be a thought partner in strategies to mitigate those risks. Such risks could include uncertainty of sustained funding, uncertainty or turbulence in implementation contexts (e.g., leadership turnover, political volatility, etc.), potentially controversial topics or perspectives, capacity concerns for your organization or key partners and others. For any risks you identify, note possible mitigation strategies, including any ways Ascendium might be helpful.

Cultures change because roles, expectations, organizational structures, values, and processes change.  Shifting the culture of a fundamentally conservative institution like higher education is a significant challenge.  Part of the goal of this project is to discover the resistance to change and find ways to overcome it.  We will need to hear directly from participants to fully appreciate what that resistance might beso that we can work together to overcome it.  In addition, in under-resourced schools like those that serve people in poverty, there is often more leadership instability that can cause disruption to the institution.  We hope that the relationships that YWMC has already established within the participating institutions can help to weather any leadership changes.  Finally, the risks of collaboration -- among the participating schools and among the project partners -- always bring challenges.  While many YWMC schools have a long relationship with the Coalition, this expansive project will engage individual faculty and staff new to YWM and consequently, involve establishing new working relationships.  Time needs to be invested in clear communication among the partners to listen and to establish trust.  It is difficult to build this element into the timeline of activities but it needs to be accomplished.