• Pathways: The institution’s ability to systematically define student pathways, map pathways to student end goals, help students choose a pathway, keep students on a pathway, and ensure that students are learning. 

• Leadership and Culture: The institution’s ability to develop and lead the execution of a strategic agenda focused on student success.

• Institutional Policy: The institution’s ability to change institutional policies, processes, and procedures to support, sustain, and institutionalize efforts to improve student success and close equity gaps. 

• Strategic Finance: The institution’s ability to strategically and effectively allocate and manage resources in support of the institution’s vision, mission, goals, and priority initiatives.

• Institutional Research: The institution’s ability to use inquiry, action research, data, and analytics to intentionally inform operational, tactical, and strategic accomplishment of its student success mission. This function—occurring both inside and outside of an institutional research office— provides timely, accurate, and actionable decision support to administrators, faculty, staff, students, and other stakeholders. 14 Institutional Transformation Assessment Capacity Areas 

• Institutional Technology: The institution’s ability to provide institutional leadership, faculty, and advisors with the tools and information they need to contribute to student success, support students, faculty and staff with IT solutions, and develop and monitor meaningful student success initiatives. 

• State Policy: The institution’s ability to leverage existing state policies or develop and/or advocate for new evidence-based state policies (which could include, depending on local context, legislative policies, board policies, rules and/or guidance documents) to support efforts to achieve equitable student success at scale. 

• Developmental Education Reform: The institution’s progress in reforming its developmental education programs to maximize the likelihood of all students completing their college-level gateway math and English courses in the first year of enrollment. 

• Advising: The institution’s focus on assessing and improving advising and support services by leveraging technology, creating student services that are proactive, structured, personalized, and sustained—and connect advising and planning. 

• Digital Learning: The institution’s progress in developing, implementing, and supporting an institution-wide strategy for delivering high-quality digital teaching and learning in face-to-face, hybrid, and online learning modalities to reduce inequitable learning outcomes for Black, Latino/a, Indigenous, poverty-affected, and other minoritized populations. 

• Emergency Aid: The institution’s ability to build and sustain an emergency aid program that provides timely grants, loans, and/or basic needs support to students facing an unexpected financial crisis.