From 2017 to 2019, MDRC's College Promise Success Initiative (CPSI) worked with College Promise programs nationwide, helping transform perceptions about college affordability and access while aiming to increase rates of enrollment and completion. Staff from the programs in CPSI met at the end of 2019 and shared insights on effectively designing…

PACE Center for Girls is a Florida-based organization that provides academic and social services to girls of middle school and high school age. Girls who attend PACE have a specific set of characteristics that put them at risk of involvement with the juvenile justice system and other negative outcomes. PACE seeks to reduce the likelihood of…

Integrated Planning and Advising for Student Success (iPASS) is an initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support colleges seeking to incorporate technology into their advising and student services. In iPASS, such technology is intended to increase advising's emphasis on a student's entire college experience, enabling…

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused seismic shifts for postsecondary education. For rural colleges, the pandemic exacerbated issues that have affected students and communities for decades. Education gaps between rural communities and their more urbanized counterparts are well documented. Rural communities have long been confronted with unique…

A community of belonging. A space to build relationships. The opportunity to have one's success affirmed. These are qualities of many programs targeting men of color that have become fixtures in recent years at colleges and universities around the United States. The Male Student Success Initiative (MSSI) is a five-year-old program at the Community…

This document presents the testimony of MDRC's Alex Mayer, the Deputy Director for Postsecondary Education at MDRC. The three points that Alex Mayer emphasizes in this testimony before the California State Assembly Higher Education Committee and the Budget Subcommittee on Education Finance on integrating postsecondary education interventions to…

Many low-income young people are not reaching important milestones for success (for example, completing a program or graduating from school on time). But the social-service organizations and schools that serve them often struggle to identify who is at more or less risk. These institutions often either over- or underestimate risk, missing…

A college degree remains critical to unlocking opportunity and to accessing America's middle class, yet millions of students who pursue higher education never earn degrees. At community colleges, which disproportionately serve low-income students and students of color, only a third of students earn a two-year degree within three years. At…

In this testimony by Alexander Mayer, Deputy Director, Postsecondary Education, Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC), Before the New Jersey State Assembly Higher Education Committee, the following three points are emphasized: (1) Developmental education is a major challenge facing low-income college students in New Jersey and across…

This practitioner brief is the first in a series highlighting concrete strategies that educational leaders can use to increase equity in education, by building supportive learning environments that meet all students' social and emotional needs. This introductory brief starts by laying out the aspects of a student's social and emotional well-being…

This post is one in a series highlighting MDRC's methodological work. Contributors discuss the refinement and practical use of research methods being employed across the organization. Across policy domains, practitioners and researchers are benefiting from a trend of greater access to both more detailed and frequent data and the increased…

In 2002, the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) launched a bold set of education reforms designed to transform the educational experiences of all high school students: They instituted a district-wide high school choice process that assigned all rising ninth-graders to specific high schools; they closed large, low-performing high…

This paper presents new estimates of the effects of the City University of New York (CUNY) Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) model, evaluated using a randomized controlled trial first in New York and later through a replication in Ohio. It describes longer-term effects of CUNY ASAP in New York, showing that the program's effects on…

MDRC's Scaling Up Community College Efforts for Student Success (SUCCESS) aims to increase graduation rates for low-income students and students of color by partnering with states and colleges to implement large-scale, financially sustainable support programs based on strong evidence. SUCCESS combines components that have been proven to help…

College students have a better chance of succeeding in school when they receive high-quality advising. High-quality advising, when characterized by frequent communications between advisers and students, early outreach to students showing signs of academic or nonacademic struggles, and personalized guidance that addresses individual student needs,…