USC's Center For Urban Ed Works To Regain Lead In College-Degree Completion


The Center for Urban Education (CUE) Partners with The Education Trust to Aid in Regaining the Nation's Lead in College-Degree Completion CUE brings expertise to states using the Center's Equity Model to achieve national goals

LOS ANGELES – The Center for Urban Education (CUE) at the University of Southern California and Washington, D.C.-based The Education Trust, an organization that advocates for closing the educational achievement gap, are collaborating on a project to share the CUE Equity Model with higher education institutions participating in the National Association of System Heads’ Access to Success (A2S) Initiative. The Access to Success Initiative aims to boost college completion and close racial and socioeconomic gaps in enrollment and graduation. Twenty-four public university systems form the initiative, and leaders from these institutions have pledged to cut in half the gaps in college access and graduation rates by the year 2015. Last month, they released baseline data on access and success for each of their systems. The data is being collected and analyzed by The Education Trust. “CUE’s research agenda and Ed Trust’s advocacy work have a shared goal—addressing racial inequity in educational outcomes,” said Dr. Estela Mara Bensimon, Professor of Higher Education and Co-Director of the Center for Urban Education. “We are natural partners and together we can make a greater impact on equity by applying CUE’s data tools to improve higher education outcomes.” In the coming months, the Center for Urban Education will lead a series of professional development workshops on the CUE Equity Model, a multi-faceted framework and set of tools used to conduct equity-based inquiry that is helping higher education institutions across the country become more accountable to students from underserved racial and ethnic communities. In this first stage of collaboration, one of the A2S states will take the lead in adopting and implementing the CUE Equity Model. Bensimon said she looks forward to replicating work completed alongside system and college leaders in Wisconsin, where the CUE Equity Model is used to assess college performance in serving African American, Latina and Latino, and Southeast Asian students. For the past several years, CUE has been working with the University of Wisconsin System (UWS) and the Wisconsin Technical College System (WTCS) at the administrative and institutional levels to identify barriers to transfer for students of color in their programs, practices, and policies. Data released last month painted a gloomy picture of college opportunity for low-income and students of color: Far too few enroll in college, and even fewer make it to graduation. In the 24 states involved in the initiative, only 45 percent of poor and minority students entering as freshmen in 1999 had received bachelor's degrees six years later, compared with 57 percent of other students. The findings about students entering two-year colleges, often perceived as a pathway to higher education, were even more disturbing. Only seven percent of historically underrepresented students who entered community college received bachelor's degrees within 10 years. Established at the University of Southern California in 1999 as part of the University's urban initiative, the Center for Urban Education (CUE) leads socially conscious research and develops tools needed for institutions of higher education to produce equity in student outcomes. To learn more: http://cue.usc.edu/