Making Excellence Inclusive

Project Activities

AAC&U’s national project, Give Students a Compass (Compass), is a collaborative that intends to redesign general education in three state higher-education systems. Compass seeks, specifically, to re-map educational aims, educational practices, and assessment strategies in large state systems in which student mobility—transfer—is a constant and an array of diversity among students a given.

A strand of the Compass project—Making Excellence Inclusive (MEI)—examines existing effective educational practices, documents underserved students’ participation in them, and probes the implications of the findings in light of the priorities for educationally productive change in general education. The inquiry illuminates action options for campuses when they uncover inequities in underserved student persistence, completion, and other traditional measures of “success.” The conceptual framework and emerging findings from this inquiry will be a central focus of the Compass project’s companion work on general education, outcomes, and assessment. The findings will be used as a catalyst for addressing the kinds of practices that should be built into the design of general education, from the first to final year.

Funding from the Lumina Foundation for Education supports expansion of the MEI strand of Compass work that is developing tools and resources to help systems and campuses create data-driven strategies to ensure underserved students participate equitably in redesigned general education curriculum.
Making Excellence Inclusive will focus specifically on five educational practices that show effectiveness for all students—and even more effective for historically underserved students. They include: 1) first year experiences, 2) learning communities, 3) service learning, 4) undergraduate research, and 5) capstone courses or activities. See the High Impact Practices.

This project is part of AAC&U’s signature initiative, Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP), which champions the value of a liberal education for individual students and for a nation dependent on economic creativity and democratic vitality. The initiative focuses campus practice on fostering essential learning outcomes for all students, whatever their chosen field of study.