Liberal Education and America's Promise (LEAP)

LEAP Projects Overview

AAC&U’s LEAP initiative includes many different strands of work and is guided by a set of Principles of Excellence originally discussed in the signature LEAP report, College Learning for the New Global Century.

See below for a list of LEAP-related projects each of which is advancing the LEAP Principles of Excellence and developing resources to help colleges, community colleges, and universities improve student achievement of the essential learning outcomes that define a 21st century liberal education.

Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement
AAC&U is working in concert with the Department of Education and other national organizations to develop a national action plan that will make civic and democratic learning, from school through college, a top national priority. This effort is part of AAC&U's ongoing commitment to help all students achieve the essential outcomes of a 21st century liberal education, including personal and social responsibility—an important cornerstone of the LEAP essential learning outcomes advanced by AAC&U.

Developing a Community College Student Roadmap
Developing a Community College Student Roadmap is designed to help community colleges create robust and proactive programs of academic support—tied to expected learning outcomes—that engage students at entrance and teach them, from the outset, how to become active partners in their own quest for educational success.  The Roadmap project is working intensively with a dozen community colleges that are poised to become national models in supporting community college student success. Collectively, these leadership institutions will work to take what are often isolated and independent student success efforts and create an integrated roadmap to support both student persistence and higher levels of academic achievement.

LEAP States Initiative
The LEAP States Initiative brings AAC&U and member campuses into intentional work together toward systemic change. Through local campus and public policy leadership, LEAP States Initiative supports public advocacy and curricular renewal for liberal education. The initiative builds platforms for campus action and frameworks to advance essential learning outcomes in general education and across institutional operations. Through targeted, system-based work, the initiative fosters cross-campus collaborations to raise levels of inclusion and success for all students.  Current LEAP States include: California, North Dakota, Oregon, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Give Students a Compass
Give Students a Compass is a tri-state partnership for college learning, general education, and underserved student success.  Through this project AAC&U is helping institutions in three state systems—California State University System, Oregon University System, and the University of Wisconsin System—build capacity to support academic excellence for all students, emphasizing the success of students traditionally underrepresented in higher education. The project has taken as a guiding framework the challenge of “making excellence inclusive” across all institutions of higher learning.

Making Excellence Inclusive
Making Excellence Inclusive is both an overriding strategic goal of AAC&U’s and a focused effort to help colleges and universities integrate diversity, equity, and educational quality efforts into their missions and institutional operations. Through the vision and practice of inclusive excellence, AAC&U calls for higher education to address diversity, inclusion, and equity as critical to the wellbeing of democratic culture. Making excellence inclusive is thus an active process through which colleges and universities achieve excellence in learning, teaching, student development, institutional functioning, and engagement in local and global communities. A high-quality, practical liberal education should be the standard of excellence for all students. The action of making excellence inclusive requires that we uncover inequities in student success, identify effective educational practices, and build such practices organically for sustained institutional change.  The initiative helps colleges, community colleges, and universities achieve inclusive excellence.  It is currently focused on building capacity of institutions to collect data on, and increase participation in, high-impact practices.

Project Kaleidoscope
Since its founding in 1989, Project Kaleidoscope (PKAL) has been one of the leading advocates in the United States for building and sustaining strong undergraduate programs in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). In 2009, PKAL joined in partnership with AAC&U.  With an extensive network of over 7,000 faculty members and administrators at more than 800 colleges and universities, PKAL has developed far-reaching influence in shaping undergraduate STEM learning environments that attract and retain undergraduate students.  PKAL accomplishes its work by engaging campus faculty and leaders in funded projects, national and regional meetings, community-building activities, leadership development programs, and publications that are focused on advancing what works in STEM education.  PKAL is currently focused on advancing a national goal to graduate increasing numbers of liberally educated scientists and scientifically capable citizens.

Quality Collaboratives
Quality Collaboratives: Assessing and Reporting Degree Qualifications Profile Competencies in the Context of Transfer is a three-year project launched with support from the Lumina Foundation and is a part of the LEAP initiative.  Beginning in October 2011, it will engage teams of educational, assessment, and policy leaders in California, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Oregon, Utah, Wisconsin, and Virginia. Two- and four-year institutions in each of these states have already been working extensively within the LEAP network of projects, states, and institutions on issues of learning outcomes, curricular change, high-impact practices, and assessment.  They will all build on these prior efforts to clarify, map, assess, and improve the achievement of learning outcomes essential for success in life, work, and citizenship in the twenty-first century. The project is built on a consensus framework of learning outcomes—articulated in the Degree Qualifications Profile (DQP). The DQP that charts levels of competence which every college student should achieve and integrate in five areas: broad and specialized knowledge, intellectual skills, applied learning, and civic learning.

Shared Futures
Shared Futures: Global Learning and Social Responsibility is a multi-project, national initiative of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. It is based upon the assumption that we live in an interdependent but unequal world and that higher education can help prepare students not only to thrive in such a world, but to remedy its inequities. AAC&U seeks to support the academy in its vital role of expanding knowledge about the world's peoples and problems and developing individuals who will advance equity and justice both at home and abroad. 

General Education for a Global Century
This current Shared Futures project works with a set of colleges, community colleges, and universities to rethink the content and re-imagine the designs of globally engaged general education programs.   Through this project, participating institutions are incorporating additional content—about such issues as diversity, democracy, global interdependence, scientific literacy to solve global problems—into general education courses and programs.  Participating institutions are also working to incorporate high-impact practices with global content throughout vertically designed general education programs.

Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education
The VALUE project seeks to contribute to the national dialogue on assessment of college student learning.  With support from the State Farm Companies Foundation and the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), the VALUE project builds on a philosophy of learning assessment that privileges authentic assessment of student work and shared understanding of student learning outcomes on campuses over reliance on standardized tests administered to samples of students outside of their required courses. The result of this philosophy has been the collaborative development of 15 rubrics by teams of faculty and academic professionals on campuses from across the country.