APLU Names 2026 Excellence in Student Success Award Finalists

Washington, DC – As part of its ongoing efforts to support public research universities’ efforts to increase student success, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) today named Bowling Green State University, the University of Central Florida, and the University of Georgia as finalists for the 2026 Excellence in Student Success Award. The annual award recognizes institutions demonstrating a comprehensive, systemic commitment to advancing student success. Through innovative initiatives, these institutions reduce barriers to educational attainment, increase graduation rates, and other improve outcomes such as time to degree, civic engagement, and career readiness.

“Congratulations to Bowling Green State University, the University of Central Florida, and the University of Georgia on being named finalists for this year’s Excellence in Student Success Award,” said APLU President Waded Cruzado. “Public and land-grant universities are leaders in advancing student success for their communities and the country at large, and we’re delighted to highlight institutions making significant strides in how they serve their students.”

The Excellence in Student Success Award is open to all APLU members. The award winner will be announced at the APLU Annual Meeting, November 15-17 in San Antonio, Texas.

More details on the Excellence in Student Success Award finalists’ efforts are below.

Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green State University (BGSU) has worked to advance student success through an integrated, systems-based approach that addresses affordability, belonging, and academic progression while equipping students with foundational skills in design thinking to navigate college and prepare for careers. The university’s early alert system enables personalized outreach to identify the root cause of each student’s challenge and connect them with targeted support. In residence halls, predictive modeling and engagement tracking help student and professional staff identify and reach students who need support across a range of needs before problems escalate, including academic advising, registration, co-curricular engagement, and care and support. Real-time dashboards give advising staff, chairs, and deans visibility into registration activity, course availability, and student progress, supporting coordinated action across the institution that promotes degree completion. BGSU has also expanded access to open educational resources, generating more than $330,000 in student savings in 2024-25, and has reduced average loan debt among graduating seniors by 13.4% since 2020. Overall, first-year retention has increased 4.1 percentage points between the 2021 and 2024 cohorts, with the institution sustaining performance at or above 80% for three consecutive years. Four-year graduation rates have risen 6.1 percentage points since the 2018 cohort, and six-year graduation rates have grown 3.5 percentage points over the same period.

University of Central Florida
To strengthen students’ sense of community, the University of Central Florida (UCF) co-developed with students a framework to help students thrive. The framework, called BEAM: Belonging, Engaging, Achieving, and Meaning, gives faculty, staff, and students a shared way to describe connection, purpose, academic progress, and well-being. The university has embedded BEAM across the student experience – informing orientation, coaching conversations, residential life, student engagement, career services, and student success programming. UCF integrated student-level analytics, centralized academic advising into the new Academic Success Coaching model, and developed cross-functional escalation processes to identify and remove barriers before they delayed student progress. UCF also created a completion acceleration team to address systemic barriers to student progress. The team connected analytics, academic success coaching, enrollment management, academic affairs, and support from UCF’s 12 colleges to resolve issues that could not be solved through individual academic success coaching alone. The university redesigned registration timelines, prioritized graduating students for required courses, expanded course capacity when demand exceeded available seats, and improved multiple graduation-related processes to facilitate timely progress. While serving one of the nation’s largest student bodies, with nearly 70,000 students, UCF increased the four-year graduation rate by 23.4 percentage points, from 40.4% for the 2011-2015 cohort to 63.8% for the 2021-2025 cohort, with projections for the 2022-2026 cohort indicating a continued increase to above 68%.

The University of Georgia
The University of Georgia takes a comprehensive approach to student success, combining innovative teaching, peer support, and high-impact experiential learning. UGA’s Active Learning initiative, which has impacted more than 90,000 students since 2018, is transforming courses to strengthen analytical reasoning, collaboration, and problem-solving while improving success in critical gateway courses. The initiative is supported by UGA’s Peer Learning Assistants program, which places trained peer educators in courses and has reached more than 52,000 students across over 600 courses. UGA’s Experiential Learning requirement connects classroom learning to the world beyond campus through internships, faculty-mentored research, study abroad, service-learning, leadership, creative projects, and other high-impact experiences. Since 2017, students have completed more than 228,000 experiential learning activities, and more than 70% of graduates complete two or more before earning their degrees. These efforts are driving results: UGA’s first-year retention rate exceeds 94%, while its four-year graduation rate increased 14 percentage points from 2010 to 2025. The six-year graduation rate rose 8 percentage points to 90%, with particularly strong gains among first-generation and rural students.