Supporting Best Practices in Student Success: Lessons from the Field. An Evaluation by the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP)

The overarching goal of the "Supporting Best Practices in Student Success Project" is to create, enhance, or expand successful programs that are replicable and can be scaled to greatly improve the percentage of underserved students who complete postsecondary education. In doing so, National College Access Network (NCAN) aimed to build its capacity and expertise to serve as a key resource for organizations seeking to engage in college success work going forward. To accomplish this goal, NCAN worked with four member organizations to create, enhance, or expand their student persistence, retention, and college success programs. The four organizations were selected through a competitive Request for Proposals (RFP) process. In their proposals, applicants articulated their vision for creating or enhancing/expanding their student success programs and outlined work to be done over the course of the project, which included both a planning and an implementation phase. This report offers an overview of the grantee organizations that participated in this project, a summary of the success work they implemented, and the outcomes they achieved. Subsequent sections describe common themes among grantee organizations, the specific practices and strategies they used to increase student retention, the success and challenges they experienced, and recommendations for organizations in the access and success field to consider as they endeavor similar programmatic work. [Co-written with Sara Melnick.]