APLU Names University of Texas Rio Grande Valley 2024 Degree Completion Award Winner

Orlando, FL – The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) today named the University of Texas Rio Grande the winner of its 2024 Degree Completion Award during a ceremony at its annual meeting. The Degree Completion Award works to identify, recognize, and reward institutions that employ innovative and evidence-based approaches to improve degree completion while ensuring educational quality.

“Congratulations to The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley on winning the Degree Completion Award,” said APLU President Mark Becker. “UTRGV has made critical strides in student success and degree completion in recent years, and we’re excited to recognize their progress.”

The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV), formed from two former universities, opened its doors in Fall 2015 with a distributed campus across a three-county region in South Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. UTRGV prioritized a holistic student success strategy rooted in a shared responsibility for student success across the institution.

The university created a Graduation Help Desk to provide concierge-like support for students facing barriers to progress toward a degree and graduation. The Graduation Help Desk sparked the creation of the Degree Progress and Graduation Initiatives unit to work across the institution and intervene when students encounter graduation obstacles. These include academic challenges, financial constraints, course availability, denied appeals, and personal issues.

To address financial barriers facing students, UTRGV launched the Plus Tuition Advantage grant, covering the cost of tuition and fees for students with unmet need who have a family income of $125,000 or less. The university’s four-year graduation rate has increased nearly ten percentage points in just five years.

The Degree Completion Award is open to all APLU members. The University of Kentucky and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas were also finalists for the award. A panel of outside reviewers examined the applications to determine the winner.