Commitment Form: Building Collaborations to Catalyze College Completion

Commitment Form: Building Collaborations to Catalyze College Completion

The President’s 2020 goal to increase the number of Americans with college degrees is essential to accelerating economic growth and strengthening the middle class. College leaders across the country are responding to this challenge and innovative practices are being piloted, evaluated, and scaled on campuses across the country. Some of these initiatives involve cutting-edge technology; others are more straightforward, like ensuring that academic credits transfer and providing additional support to at-risk students. By evaluating these practices, sharing what we learn, and emulating what works – particularly at institutions that collectively serve large numbers of students – we can increase the number of college graduates.

To emphasize ways in which more Americans can finish college, we plan to highlight higher education institutions that are collaborating to produce more college graduates. At the December summit, we hope to announce your commitments to produce an additional number of college graduates over the next decade, particularly low-income and under-represented students, along with commitments to action around counseling, K-12-higher education community partnerships, college readiness (remediation/developmental education), and STEM.

This web form will provide us with a brief overview of your goals and commitments and a description of your action plan. This information may form the basis of public materials developed for this event. We encourage interested collaborations to also download the worksheet that will allow each collaboration to share more detail with us about your specific indicators, data, and strategies you are using as you develop these plans. Only 1 submission per collaboration needs to be submitted and campuses may submit additional materials (if desired) through the use of appendices, which should be submitted to educationpolicy@who.eop.gov.

Please submit this form no later than COB Friday, October 31, 2014.

We respectfully request that you submit this form no later than October 31, 2014. We intend to make the description of goals and commitments public in conjunction with the summit in December. While we intend to invite as many organizations making commitments as possible, we have not finalized the details of the event and will share more information in the coming weeks.

Note: Your information may be shared with other federal agencies participating in this event.

Thank You

For your submission

Commitment & Action Plan Summary: Please Limit Your Response To No More Than 500 Words. *

College Completion Goal: *

Please identify the number of additional college graduates the above identified colleges commit to producing by 2020 and 2025, including the collaboration’s plan to focus on producing additional graduates from low-income and underrepresented backgrounds. We encourage collaborations to seek to produce these incremental graduates, to the extent possible, at the same or lower cost. Please also describe below how your collaboration set its college completion goal. (Up to 500 words.)

College Completion Collaboration: *

Please describe in 500 words or less how the collaboration will work to together to identify or develop evidence-based, promising, and/or innovative practices aimed at improving college persistence and completion. In your description please include information about how the collaboration will pilot and evaluate these practices, systematically share lessons learned, and develop a plan for scaling-up proven strategies across institutions.

College Completion Action Plan: In 1000 words or less please identify the specific strategies and action the collaboration plans to implement with participating institutions to help the collaboration reach their goal *

Strategies and actions could include (among others):

Using predictive analytics to gather data on at risk students and using the data to design interventions to keep students on track to graduate;

Leveraging new technologies to improve student learning such as new advancements in adaptive learning that uses computer-based instruction to adapt to individual student needs;

Employing financial interventions including supplementing state and federal financial aid when needed to ensure students don’t drop out;

Developing and testing behavioral interventions that provide just-time information or support to students to prevent students from leaving school;

Focusing on targeting, testing and scaling, student supports and interventions that are tailored to the needs of specific student subpopulations at risk of failing to complete.

Download Worksheet:

Download the worksheet (.docx), then upload the completed version.

Upload Worksheet:

Primary Collaboration Contact Name: *

Phone: *

Address: *

Email: *

Please tell us more about the participating colleges/universities in this collaboration *

Please include participating Colleges/Universities, President/Chancellor, and contact info (name, email, phone).

Upon successful submission, you will be taken to a web page confirming your registration was received.

*Required Field