Executive Director’s Note

By Julia Michaels

We hear you. The results of our Powered by Publics membership survey are clear. More of you want to see results from the work you’re doing with your cluster. You also want to know how this engagement is impacting the goals we all share – more students, particularly those who identify as low-income, minority, and first-generation, completing college.

Our journey towards continuous improvement began in the first year of Powered by Publics, when each cluster selected a focus area and began identifying and investigating barriers to student completion. During the second year, although the pandemic slowed us down, we started to home in on variation in student performance, and the root causes of equity gaps that persist at so many institutions. Many clusters began projects to generate new knowledge or improve practice around promising solutions to those problems.

This Fall, we’ll be working to develop more specific improvement aims for clusters ready to advance to the next level. This involves generating a hypothesis around a specific change idea, and then testing that idea to measure the effect on some short-term indicators of success. By starting with small, achievable changes in your day-to-day work, we can build up to bigger changes across the higher education system.

We’ll also be accelerating our efforts to share and promote each cluster’s work, starting with our public Learning Exchange (to be introduced at our November meeting), a new and improved webpage, and a slate of new cross-cluster learning opportunities for 2022. You can expect to see more short reports and working papers, as well as other media.

In the meantime, check out this issue of the newsletter, which includes:

• Registration for the Powered by Publics Annual Meeting, November 2 and 4. Please note this year the Powered by Publics Annual Meeting is separate from the APLU Annual Meeting, November 15-17. Both events will be held virtually.
• A learning memo from the Metropolitan Cluster’s work to implement proactive advising to better meet the needs of Pell-eligible students.
• A profile of Hayden Free, a first-generation college student who helped build Curricular Analytics, a tool helping institutions address curricular barriers to student success.
• A job opening at APLU for our Vice President for Access, Success, and Equity.
• An October 4 APLU Event Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month.
• And a profile of the University of Nevada, Reno’s Nevada FIT Program and how it’s supporting student success.