IMPROVE CAPACITY

Lumina Foundation aims to ensure that colleges and universities strengthen their institutional and system capacity to serve more students and more diverse populations.

Ensuring future generations achieve their educational aspirations involves a fundamental shift in attitude toward higher education. The United States' economic growth, standard of living and quality of life requires that citizens obtain a high-quality college education at a cost they can afford.

Redesigning the way in which higher education is delivered and taught can increase college productivity, address the needs of certain student populations and reduce the overall cost of higher education. Read Toward a New Way of Thinking: Quality, Productivity and College Costs. PDF
Higher education reform requires continual innovation. An effort funded by the Pew Charitable Trust demonstrates how postsecondary institutions can redesign their instructional approaches to achieve cost savings, while enhancing educational quality. Read Increasing Success for Underserved Students: Redesigning Introductory Courses.
Focusing on the first year, monitoring student progress, providing programs for at-risk students—these are all ways that institutions can bear some of the responsibility for students' success. The Community College Survey of Student Engagement PDF provides a tool for assessing the quality of education in community colleges. Created in 2001, the annual survey helps colleges focus on practices and programs that promote high levels of student learning and retention, as well as identify areas for improvement.

Alternative learning paradigms—including online instruction and promoting timely degree completion—influence an institution's capacity to serve more students and more diverse student populations. State funding policies linked to degree completion provide an incentive for institutions to design efforts that increase enrollment and persistence of students. A study by the National Center for Academic Transformation found that 25 of 30 institutions that redesigned a popular course by making smart use of technology and engaging professors as tutors, rather than lecturers, improved learning outcomes, lowered costs and increased student productivity and access. Read Hitting Home: Quality, Cost, and Access Challenges Confronting Higher Education Today. PDF

Different student populations require different kinds of interventions. Applying uniform accountability or performance measures without taking these differences into account is counterproductive. See the National Postsecondary Education Cooperative's Enhancing Student Success in Education: Summary Report of the NPEC Initiative and National Symposium on Postsecondary Student Success. PDF

Many components of higher education, including access to financial aid and campus support services, do not support the needs of nontraditional or re-entry students. Students 25 years of age and older are the new majority on college campuses. A number of states have successfully implemented programs and practices to help adult learners succeed in higher education. Among them: financial aid programs for part-time students, incentives to institutions for graduating reentry students and instituting academic policies that encourage converting work experience into earned academic credit. See WICHE's Thinking Outside the Box: Policy Strategies for Readiness, Access and Success. PDF
An expectations gap between what postsecondary institutions require and what high schools produce affects student success. Nearly 40 percent of all high school students must take at least one remedial course when they begin college. Data show that among students entering a four-year institution, 87 percent of those who had taken a rigorous curriculum in high school were still on track to a bachelor's degree three years later, compared with only 62 percent of students who had followed a basic high school curriculum. Read the U.S. Department of Education's report A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education. PDF