Over the past few decades, postsecondary institutions have increasingly adopted comprehensive student success interventions designed to address academic, financial, and personal barriers to student persistence and completion. The City University of New York’s Accelerated Study in Academic Programs (CUNY ASAP) is a prominent student success model, replicated across several states, with a substantial body of evidence demonstrating positive outcomes on increasing retention, credit accumulation, graduation rates, and return on investment. Many other comprehensive student success models, including One Million Degrees, Massachusetts SUCCESS, and TRIO Student Support Services, among others, also feature some combination of proactive advising, financial support, academic support, career development, and intentional, long-term student engagement.

For state leaders, higher education systems, and institutional partners, the central question is no longer whether comprehensive student success models broadly work, but how to build the fiscal and policy infrastructure needed to sustain and expand them. While many replication efforts begin with philanthropic or time-limited grant funding, long-term success depends on integrating these programs into recurring funding streams, aligning them with state educational priorities, and cultivating the partnerships and capacity necessary for continued growth. Yet, relatively little practical guidance exists on how to secure sustainable funding and scale effectively. With support from the CUNY ASAP National Replication Collaborative and ECMC Foundation, we are launching a playbook today that aims to fill this gap.

Ithaka S+R’s Financing Sustainability and Scale: A Playbook for Funding the Implementation and Expansion of Student Success Initiatives explores how institutional and system leaders have developed financing strategies, engaged policymakers and stakeholders, leveraged evidence to build support, and transitioned from short-term investments to more durable funding models through a series of profiles of comprehensive student success initiatives. Rather than prescribing a single approach, the profiled initiatives illustrate a range of pathways that reflect differing state contexts, governance structures, funding environments, and institutional capacities.

The playbook outlines several lessons gleaned from the initiatives, including:

  1. Senior level support is necessary, but sustainable implementation requires leadership at multiple levels. Across the profiled initiatives, interviewees note that visible, credible champions at the highest levels (presidents, chancellors, boards, state legislators) are key. However, a network of champions and leaders is needed at both the campus- and system-level. Implementation appears stronger when a dedicated leader has the capacity and authority to make the initiative central to campus work, and when large-scale programs develop governance structures that encourage collaboration across campuses.
  2. Do not underestimate the infrastructure needed for quality implementation. Several interviewees highlighted the amount of operational work these initiatives require: recruitment, eligibility, financial aid coordination, incentive distribution, tutoring tracking, reporting, data systems, advisor hiring, websites, press events, and communication with faculty and program staff. These infrastructure issues lend themselves best to system-level solutions and support, when possible.
  3. Sustainability is a financing strategy, not a single funding source. A major cross-cutting finding is that start-up funding is powerful because it creates runway, infrastructure, and proof of concept. State innovation grants, transformation funds, and philanthropic dollars help launch programs, but long-term sustainability requires creative strategies, as “sustainability” is not a single funding source. It is a strategy for gradually shifting core costs, especially advisor and leadership staffing, into recurring budgets, while finding flexible funds for student-facing supports that are harder to fund with public dollars.
  4. Institutionalization is both a financial and organizational culture outcome. The most successful examples seem to be those where initiatives moved from a discrete grant-funded program to becoming embedded within larger student success strategies. This suggests that sustainability is not just financial but also cultural. At the same time, some interviewees noted that initiative fatigue and perceived competition between initiatives are potential barriers to the work, further strengthening the argument that successful initiatives are those that become part of a larger, integrated and holistic approach to student success strategy.

By documenting the decision-making process, funding mechanisms, partnerships, and implementation processes that have enabled successful programs to grow beyond initial pilots, this resource seeks to inform future efforts to institutionalize evidence-based student success interventions. Ultimately, improving student outcomes at scale depends not only on identifying interventions that work, but also on creating the fiscal and policy conditions necessary for those interventions to endure and expand.