The American Council on Education (ACE), in partnership with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, will reimagine the 50-year-old Carnegie Classification System to better reflect higher education’s public purpose and impact. The Carnegie system is the leading framework for classifying colleges and universities, clustering institutions by factors such as numbers and types of degrees awarded and research activity. View Website

This grant will enable the Los Angeles Postsecondary Funders Collaborative, managed by the California Community Foundation, to re-engage young people who graduated from high school but never enrolled in college, and re-enroll college students who have stopped out. The Collaborative will identify an intermediary organization partnering with local high schools and colleges to execute a strategy of in-person and virtual admissions advising, career exploration, and FAFSA completion. View Website

This grant will enable the Community College Research Center (CCRC) at Columbia University’s Teachers College to address low and inequitable transfer and bachelor’s degree completion rates for the millions of students who start at community colleges and intend to transfer to four-year institutions. Inadequate practice and policy support for transfer have long made it one of the most significant barriers for students seeking to earn bachelor’s degrees. View Website

This grant will contribute to Grantmakers for Education being able to plan and host its annual 700-person conference fully in-person for the first time since the pandemic, using the conference as an opportunity to reimagine the purpose of higher education, whom it serves, and the form it takes. View Website

This grant will fund the Institute to launch a superintendent academy to help high school district leaders create comprehensive plans for college and career readiness strategies, something that is frequently missing in urban school districts. It will focus on conveying critical structures and practices in postsecondary leadership, data strategy, and school counselor engagement. View Website

The fourth of the team's media grants, this grant will allow the Education Writers Association, a national professional development association, to strengthen and expand higher education reporting capacity, helping ensure that students and policymakers make better-informed decisions. View Website

This grant will support Hechinger Report, the only national nonprofit newsroom focused exclusively on higher education, to implement its diversity, equity, and inclusion strategic plan, which includes retaining reporters of color, creating an HBCU fellowship program, translating its publications into Spanish, deepening its partnerships with media outlets like Telemundo, recruiting diverse voices for op-eds, and hosting internal DEI workshops and training. The grant is one of four higher education media grants designed to increase the number of journalists of color covering higher education View Website

This grant will enable the Campaign for College Opportunity to fortify its broad cross-sector coalition in pursuit of boosting the state’s postsecondary attainment rate from 52% to 70% by 2030 to meet workforce and economic needs. The Campaign promotes evidence-based policies and practices to improve student success and close racial equity gaps, and has established itself as a force to be reckoned with in Sacramento. View Website

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This grant will enable Jobs for the Future (JFF) to grow and sustain the Student Success Center Network (SSCN), a network of 17 statewide Centers that support community colleges to improve student outcomes. Kresge has helped launch many Centers in the past decade, including in all four of our focus states, and they have become consistent and valued state-level access points for high quality technical assistance, cross-college collaboration, and faculty engagement, especially around institutional reform and student success. View Website

This grant will enable the Center for Community College Student Engagement (CCCSE) at the University of Texas to use its Community College Survey of Student Engagement national-level dataset to better understand the mental health and wellbeing crisis among community college students. This grant will help CCCSE develop a survey informing college presidents, policymakers, and researchers about ways they can support students with better holistic well-being resources to enhance postsecondary outcomes. View Website

This grant will enable Dr. John Silvanus Wilson, Jr., to disseminate the findings of his forthcoming book, Hope and Healing: Black Colleges and the Future of American Democracy, on college campuses and at higher education and policy conferences and meetings. Dr. Wilson highlights the traditional strengths of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), the significant role they have played in higher education, and what it has taken for them to survive amid longstanding challenges like racism, Jim Crow segregation, and economic disparities. View Website

This grant will enable the National Center for Inquiry and Improvement (NCII) to partner with the Aspen Institute College Excellence Program and the Ohio Student Success Center to scale Ohio’s successful Leadership Academy in three new states.  Ascendium, ECMC Foundation and Kresge will each fund one state’s implementation of a year-long, student success-focused professional development program for mid-level community college faculty and staff. View Website

This grant will enable the John N. Gardner Institute for Excellence in Undergraduate Education (JNGI) to launch the first phase of the “Transforming the Foundational Postsecondary Experience” project, co-funded equally by Ascendium and the Bill and Melinda Gates and ECMC Foundations. View Website

This grant will support the national scaling of Strong Start to Finish (SSTF), a developmental (remedial) education reform strategy. While the vast majority of community college students place into non-credit bearing developmental education courses, especially in math, almost none ever transition to credit-bearing courses, wasting time and money, and torpedoing any chance of ever obtaining a degree. View Website

This grant will enable the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) to promote student loan reform to make postsecondary education more affordable for all. NCLC supports a network of legal services and private consumer attorneys who directly represent consumers, including people with student loans, in cities across America. View Website

This grant will enable the E3 Alliance (Education Equals Economics) to host convenings, administer an emergency college student financial aid fund, and manage a longitudinal dataset projecting key student success indicators and outcomes. E3 will also implement recommendations from a year-long series of community dialogues with students and families, and scale capacity-building activities to support member sustainability, thereby ensuring stronger postsecondary success for Central Texas students and families. View Website

This grant will allow Bottom Line to share its best-in-class curriculum and training modules with other college advising programs. Bottom Line operates one of the nation’s best college advising coaching programs: over 75% of its students graduate college within six years with no more than $31,000 in debt, far surpassing national graduation rates and average college debt levels for students of color. View Website

This grant enables Student Defense, a nonpartisan organization representing students against predatory for-profit colleges and loan servicers, to establish a research center to support its policy advocacy and litigation. Student Defense has represented borrowers against predatory for-profit colleges and loan servicers in debt cases, helping secure $7.5 billion in loan discharges for over 400,000 borrowers defrauded by these entities. View Website

This grant will enable the Intercultural Research Development Association (IDRA), a Texas-based research and advocacy organization, to strengthen its Education Policy Fellows program by expanding its programmatic partnerships, refining its curriculum, and broadening its communication efforts. View Website