A team of Vassar College researchers, headed by President Elizabeth H. Bradley, have secured a grant from the Andrew Carnegie Foundation for a “Study and Showcase on Institutional Equity, College Completion, and Subsequent Earnings.”

The team’s prior research identified a series of five recurrent themes that were prominent in top-performing colleges and universities—all implementable in low-resource environments. This project will augment that work by studying institutions identified through statistical modeling of national data as having recently elevated their graduation rates, taking a longitudinal view of performance and examining institutions that have experienced positive change in the last 5–7 years. Understanding their case histories and interventions will provide compelling evidence about the factors associated with promoting improvement.

The project’s outcomes will be shared next year at a capstone event, a National Showcase in Higher Education, highlighting practical approaches that have worked, stories that can be repeated, and lessons that may motivate a larger pool of institutions to adopt the recurrent effective practices this research seeks to unveil.

Wendy Maragh Taylor, Associate Dean of the College for Student Growth and Engagement, will join President Bradley as lead investigator on the project. Also on the team are Charlotte Gullick, Director of the Exploring Transfer Program and a member of the Student Growth and Engagement Office; Biniam Tesfamariam, Associate Vice President for Institutional Research and Strategic Decision Support; Carlos Alamo, Dean of the College and Professor of Sociology; and Michelle Quock, Director of First-generation, Low Income (FLI) Program. Assistant Professor of Economics Zhengren Zhu will also be involved in the project’s quantitative work.

The Andrew Carnegie Foundation was established by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding. Today the foundation works to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for the issues that Carnegie considered most important: education, democracy, and peace.