Resources

Aligning Financial Sustainability with Student Access and Success: Opportunities for Private Colleges

This report highlights long-term academic and financial opportunities for small colleges by attracting and retaining those students who face the highest barriers to enrollment and completion.

Private nonprofit colleges that are smaller, less competitive, tuition-dependent, and/or have relatively low endowments are consistently identified as the most financially vulnerable, even more so during a pandemic. Yet researchers found that these schools can turn around their fiscal performance by reframing service to students with the most challenges–those from low-income households, who are first-generation and/ or are people of color–as an opportunity, rather than a challenge.

Demographic portrait of grantees: What we’re learning and doing to support inclusion and improve our practices

Equitable Value: Promoting Economic Mobility and Social Justice through Postsecondary Education

The push to improve postsecondary education as a path to opportunity has evolved over the past generation – from a focus on expanding access to expanding access and success and making both more equitable. Now is the time to extend that focus to include value – the returns to students and society.

The Postsecondary Value Commission has tapped newly available data and insights to propose a new approach for measuring the value of education after high school and to recommend actions that college and university leaders, state and federal policymakers, and students and families can take to improve those returns and make them more equitable.

Youth with Autism Benefit from Services that Improve Transitions to Adulthood

Youth with autism face particular challenges as they become adults. New research supported by the Autism Speaks Foundation showed that even though most youth with autism and their families received at least some transition and support services prior to their enrollment in the federal initiative, Promoting Readiness of Minors in Supplemental Security Income (PROMISE), many did not receive key services like case management, employment services, benefits counseling, or financial education. Mathematica’s study of the impact after 18 months of PROMISE on youth with autism include key findings.

The Community Ecocycle in Place-Based Systems Change: A Tool for Funder and Community Reflection and Action

This tool is intended to help funders who have elected to invest in place-based systems change efforts in two ways. First, funders can use this tool to consider the dynamic, natural, and necessary developmental phases through which communities move. Second, the tool can help funders engage with communities to co-design investment approaches that better match communities’ current and future assets and needs based on their developmental phase.

SHSF Public Transit Map

The SHSF Public Transit Map offers a first look at public transportation accessibility at America’s community and technical colleges. Should a student need a car to get to community college? Transit infrastructure is a critical component of community college access and affordability, but the absence of national analysis has hampered support for students.

Through the SHSF Public Transit Map, our team has produced a national analysis of transit accessibility at community and technical colleges. The (in)accessibility of community colleges via public transportation is a key equity issue that cuts across transit, workforce development, and higher education.