Publications

In 2020, the FAFSA Simplification Act restored access to Pell Grants for students who are incarcerated, reversing a nearly 30-year ban on their eligibility for federal aid. To access Pell Grant funding, eligible students must be enrolled in federally recognized Prison Education Programs. In this brief, we walk through the multi-year, multi-phase process to demystify the federal regulations and highlight its significance in improving higher education in prison data infrastructure—a critical need for the field.

Nearly 400 higher education in prison programs now operate across the US, yet basic data about these students at scale—such as enrollment, retention, and completion—is often inaccessible or inconsistent. As these programs expand, strengthening data infrastructure has become both a practical necessity and a moral imperative.

One way to achieve bachelor's degree attainment for community college transfer students at scale is through state- and region-level initiatives dedicated to supporting transfer from community colleges to independent colleges and universities. The Teagle Foundation and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations’ Transfer Pathways to the Liberal Arts initiative aimed to create such pathways. This playbook draws on the experiences of grantees building pathways in 14 states.

MAAPS is a large-scale randomized-controlled trial designed to validate the effectiveness of intensive, proactive, technology-enhanced advisement in increasing achievement, persistence, and completion of historically underserved students. This final report on the project presents impact findings for the intent-to-treat effect of MAAPS advisement on participating students’ outcomes for the final analytic sample of 10,037 students and at each participating institution after six academic years.

Executive Summary The Texas Student Success Program Inventory (SSPI), available at https://www.highered.texas.gov/sspi, is an online database of information related to student success programs at public colleges and universities, commissioned by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB). Consistent with nearly every other state, prior to the creation of the SSPI, there was no organized source of information about student success programming in Texas. By creating a user-friendly tool for publicly sharing information, the SSPI is…