ECU Joins National Effort to Increase College Access | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: The author of this post, Kristin Zachary, is a contributor to ECU News Services.

    East Carolina University is participating in a new effort in which 130 public universities and systems will work together to increase college access, close the achievement gap, and award hundreds of thousands more degrees by 2025.

    The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) is organizing the collaborative effort, known as Powered by Publics: Scaling Student Success. The participating institutions will work within clusters of four to 12 institutions as they concurrently implement innovative and effective practices to advance student success on their campuses. Collectively, the institutions enroll 3 million students, including 1 million students who receive Pell Grants.

    Powered by Publics represents the largest-ever collaborative effort to improve college access, advance equity and increase college degrees awarded. In addition to committing to those goals, participating institutions have pledged to share aggregate data demonstrating their progress to help spur lasting change across the higher education sector.

    "Student success is ECU's first priority. It is our prime directive. It always has been and it always will be," said Dr. Ron Mitchelson, ECU provost. "Our approach to success is to engage students in meaningful ways with opportunities to lead, to research, to serve, to study abroad, and to innovate. Our formula for success is working well and our graduation rates are now at historic highs.

• "Yet there is much more to be done, and in collaboration with other UNC System schools, and with other institutions like Clemson, Florida State, Virginia Tech and the University of South Carolina, we are expanding our student success tool kit."

    "Over the past few years, we've witnessed a real and growing enthusiasm among public university leaders to advance college completion nationally," said APLU President Peter McPherson. "We have to seize the moment and mobilize institutions to improve not just college access, but also equity in student outcomes and the number of students who earn degrees. That's what Powered by Publics is all about and why we're thrilled to work with our member institutions toward such an important national goal."

    By design, the participating institutions reflect a wide array of institutional characteristics such as enrollment, student demographics, regional workforce needs and selectivity. The broad diversity of the institutions is intended to help create a playbook of adaptable student success reforms that can be adopted and scaled up across a variety of institution types, including those with limited resources.

    Each cluster has a different focus area for its work. One cluster, for example, will work collaboratively to integrate data collection systems across each of its campuses to better monitor student progress and make data-informed decisions. Another cluster expects to tackle financial aid and student financial literacy. ECU's cluster is focused on the success of transfer students and predictive analytics.

    The effort will be overseen by APLU's Center for Public University Transformation, which the association created this year to help drive transformational change across the public higher education sector.