USU’s work starts with student success. USU supports a set of institutions that plan and implement groundbreaking reforms to facilitate student success, boost degree completion, and revitalize their communities in the process. Student success reforms are particularly focused on recruiting, admitting, retaining, educating, and graduating high‐need, traditionally at‐risk students while reducing costs, reexamining campus business models, and fostering mutually beneficial campus‐community engagements.
USU also helps institutions transform their communities through partnerships. Guided by the belief that public urban universities are anchors in their regions, USU undertakes a variety of efforts to build a skilled workforce, drive robust economic growth, address inequities, and enhance community sustainability. To achieve these aims, USU institutions partner with key stakeholders in their communities such as K‐12 systems, local businesses, health systems, workforce organizations, community organizations and philanthropic foundations.
USU’s University-Community Partnerships work to advance student success, degree completion, and community transformation. Institutions awarded grants supporting this work undertake a variety of nascent reforms touching virtually every aspect of the student experience to establish the environment necessary for students to thrive.
In an effort to ensure cash‐strapped students with a proven record of academic success do not drop out due to financial need, some pathbreaking public universities are offering completion grants of a few hundred dollars to help students make tuition payments as they near graduation. APLU and USU are now building on this work by undertaking a rigorous empirical review of completion grants’ efficacy.
APLU and USU are working with public universities to research, develop, and test new, scalable university business models that boost student learning and degree completion. These transformations are aimed at establishing a comprehensive playbook for overhauling how students progress through college. USU shares the practices and findings identified through this work with APLU members to help better serve their students.
Diversifying the workforce starts with college admissions. That’s why APLU, USU, and other organizations led a landmark study of holistic review in admissions to assess the state of holistic admissions practices across health profession schools and examine the impact of those practices on diversity, student success, and community engagement. USU’s research outlines various admissions practices that can be adopted to improve diversity in health disciplines.
APLU and USU are engaged in a collaborative of university leaders, faculty, researchers and national education and improvement organizations who are committed to innovative, evidence-based practices that increase degree attainment by transforming the college student experience and creating equitable learning environments. The SEP will utilize more than a decade of social psychology research demonstrating positive experiences of community, belonging, and support on campus and in the classroom can increase a student’s likelihood of persevering through academic challenges toward graduation.
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