Expanding access to college
December 11, 2017
UD joins American Talent Initiative, helping expand access for 50,000 low- and moderate-income students
The University of Delaware joined colleges and universities around the nation in an alliance to substantially expand the number of talented low- and moderate-income students at undergraduate institutions. This growing consortium, called the American Talent Initiative (ATI) brings together a diverse set of public and private institutions with the highest graduation rates in a shared goal of educating 50,000 additional high-achieving, lower-income students.
“At the University of Delaware, we believe strongly that broad access to a high-quality education benefits individual students and strengthens our entire society,” University of Delaware President Dennis Assanis said. “We are committed to boosting socioeconomic and racial diversity on our campus, and we are eager to build on our programs that open doors for all high-achieving students. We look forward to collaborating with colleges and universities nationwide through the American Talent Initiative to lower barriers and ensure that talented students who have worked hard in high school not only go to college, but also graduate and succeed.”
UD and other ATI members—86 colleges to date—commit to enhancing efforts to recruit, enroll, and support lower-income students, learn from each other, and contribute to research that will help other colleges and universities effectively serve lower-income students.
UD, which has a six-year graduation rate of 81 percent (compared with the national average of 59 percent) and a strong track record for post-graduate success, is working toward enhancing existing strategies and programming that:
Recruits students from diverse socio-economic backgrounds through robust outreach;
Ensures that admitted lower-income students enroll and are retained through practices that have been shown to be effective;
Prioritizes need-based financial aid; and
Minimizes or eliminates gaps in progression and graduation rates between and among students from low-, moderate- and high-income families.
Launched in December 2016, ATI is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies and was founded with a national goal of educating 50,000 additional high-achieving, lower-income students at the 270 colleges and universities with the highest graduation rates by 2025.
According to ATI’s analysis of the most recent federal data available, there are approximately 430,000 lower-income students enrolled at these 270 institutions. ATI aims to increase and sustain the total number of lower-income students attending these top-performing colleges to about 480,000 by 2025. To reach this ambitious goal, ATI will work to support its members’ work while adding more top-performing colleges to its membership in the coming months and years.
Research shows that when high-achieving, lower-income students attend high-performing institutions such as UD, they graduate at higher rates, and have a greater chance of attaining leadership positions and other opportunities throughout their lives.
Yet in each graduating high school class, there are at least 12,500 lower-income young people with outstanding academic credentials who do not enroll at institutions where they have the greatest likelihood of graduating. ATI member institutions seek to ensure that these “missing” students have a path to attend and thrive in college.
About the American Talent Initiative
ATI is co-managed by the Aspen Institute’s College Excellence Program and Ithaka S+R and funded with an initial $1.7 million, multi-year grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies. Grant funding will be used for best-practice research and dissemination, convenings of college presidents and staff, and data analysis and reporting. A publication focusing on financial strategies to bolster lower-income student success was made available in February 2017 on the ATI website. New ATI research on increasing opportunity for the incredible talent found across our nation’s community colleges will be published later this year.
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