Postsecondary Access and Success

By 2018, 62 percent of jobs in the United States will require a college education, yet college completion rates lag dramatically, with only 38 percent of young adults aged 25-34 holding a postsecondary degree. The graduation rates for students of color, low-income youth, and first generation college goers are even lower, further widening the disparity gap.

In response, stakeholders across the educational system, including K-12 school districts, higher education institutions, community organizations, governments, philanthropy, and businesses, are testing strategies to increase student college entry and completion rates. Initially focused on issues of academic preparation, knowledge about how to get to college, and on providing student supports and financial guidance, postsecondary stakeholders are now tackling institutional policy and system practices that have impeded higher education completion. Rigorous data analysis is helping to identify curricular misalignment, faulty financial aid formulas and processes, and the lack of accountability for student success.

For the past decade, OMG professionals have been national thought leaders in planning and evaluating multi-faceted postsecondary success strategies that reform fundamental policy and practice. Our OMG team is currently working on numerous national, leading-edge initiatives that aim to systemically improve postsecondary success opportunities for all youth and young adults.

Pathways to Completion: The Postsecondary Achievement Trajectory in Philadelphia
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Funded by the Mayor’s Office of Education in the City of Philadelphia, Pathways to Completion provides an in-depth analysis of the postsecondary progress of Philadelphia public high school graduates. Using data provided by over 20 institutions of higher education in the Philadelphia area, this project focused on first-time students’ enrollment, persistence, and completion patterns over the past six years. The analysis provides policy-makers with baseline measures of postsecondary success in order to inform local and state decision making.
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Management Evaluation of the Completion by Design Initiative
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OMG, with DVP-Praxis, is conducting a real-time technical assistance and investment strategy assessment of the Completion by Design Initiative, a large-scale effort across 21 colleges in four states to completely redesign institutional structures, policies, and practices to increase student academic momentum and completion. The evaluation relies primarily on interview and observation data to assess the uptake, understanding, and clarity of the work across a multi-level national assistance team, the foundation, and the funded colleges. Rapid feedback memos and facilitated discussions with the management team help test and fine-tune the design of the initiative and improve the alignment and functioning of the management and technical assistance teams to better support the work of the colleges.
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Evaluation of the Benefits Access for College Completion Initiative
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The Benefits Access for College Completion initiative is testing whether six colleges across four states can develop and institutionalize scalable and sustainable policy and practice changes that help a diverse population of eligible students gain access to an array of public benefits; and whether increased access to these benefits can increase college completion for low-income students. OMG, with DVP-Praxis, is conducting a formative and summative assessment of the initiative.  Formative evaluation findings are shared through real-time memos with the colleges and the technical assistance team to fine-tune the work on the ground. The summative evaluation will include critical lessons for scaling within states and across the community college field. Impact findings will be used by CLASP and AACC in their benefits access advocacy efforts.   
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Evaluation of the Strive Partnership Value Added
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OMG is conducting an evaluation of the Strive Partnership’s collective impact in the Greater Cincinnati region. Founded in 2006, the Strive Partnership -- comprised of more than 300 organizations -- plays a catalytic role in bringing partners together across sectors to work to improve educational outcomes for children. The Strive Partnership regularly measures and publicly reports its progress based on a set of numeric outcome indicators. Nonetheless, the organization is now interested in assessing its own value using qualitative methods. OMG’s evaluation includes an online partner survey; 25 in-depth, interviews with select stakeholders; and a series of focus groups with partners. The OMG team is working closely with the Strive Partnership staff to ensure that findings are timely and informative to the organization’s ongoing self-improvement process.  In addition to a final report, OMG is providing the Strive Partnership with an evaluation plan and tools for repeating the evaluation in the future.
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Theory of Change Development for SkillUp Washington’s Community College Completion Initiatives
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SkillUp Washington’s Skill Link initiative is a partnership-building effort linking community college campuses, local workforce boards, and community-based organizations to increase college completion and employment rates for high-needs students. SkillUp engaged OMG to work with its key partners -- The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, and the Washington Workforce Board -- to build consensus and align divergent perspectives and expectations through a Theory of Change process. The series of retreats and resulting frameworks have given the partners a shared vision for the work, a common tool for communication and a guide for shared accountability and decision-making. OMG is also conducting workshops with Skill Link grantees to help develop grantee-specific Theories of Change within the initiative framework and to identify specific outcomes to measure impact. 
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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Community Partnerships for Postsecondary Success Portfolio
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OMG is conducting an evaluation of The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Community Partnerships for Postsecondary Success Portfolio. The portfolio is a multi-year, multi-million dollar initiative to increase postsecondary completion rates in eight communities across the country. OMG’s formative and summative evaluation documents system-level impact in each community, how communities are achieving that impact, and the added value of various grantmaking strategies. Yielding a set of design principles, the evaluation will inform the Gates Foundation’s Postsecondary Strategy Refresh in 2013, and other communities interested in advancing postsecondary system change.
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Citi Foundation’s Postsecondary Success Program (PSP)
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The PSP initiative aims to improve college access and success among low-income and first-generation college students in Philadelphia, Miami, and San Francisco. Through a mixed methods approach, OMG is evaluating grantee implementation, and student-level outcomes. Lessons learned are providing guidance to all participants about current effectiveness, and to Citi about PSP’s potential for scaling and adoption.
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Posse Foundation Capacity Evaluation
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The Posse Foundation, a national college access and success program, identifies diverse student leaders, provides them with pre-college training, and supports them once on campus to succeed in the college environment. OMG assessed program capacity to recruit more college partners, maintain program quality, and provide an effective and efficient organizational infrastructure in an expanded model. Lessons learned are helping to steer national program expansion.
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John S. and James L. Knight Foundation's Graduate!Philadelphia Program
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Through an evaluation, OMG assisted Graduate!Philadelphia, a program for students with some college credits, to strengthen its organizational capacity to impact more students. OMG’s evaluation of I-Lead’s College Without Walls program articulated a clear model, and helped it scale to new sites. Through this work both organizations increased their ability to collect and use data to demonstrate program outcomes, and for ongoing programmatic reviews and improvements.
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Student African American Brotherhood (SAAB)
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Operating in student-run college and high-school chapters throughout the country, the Student African American Brotherhood works to increase the number of African American and Latino men graduating from college by helping them excel in their schools and communities. Sponsored by the Lumina Foundation for Education, OMG's three-year evaluation examined the program’s impact on college access and success for chapter students, and helped SAAB build data collection systems for ongoing program effectiveness.
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