Diversity, Equity, and Student Success

Through its Office of Diversity, Equity, and Student Success, AAC&U works to accelerate broad-scale innovation and institutional change to advance evidence-based educational strategies, including, but not limited to, the intentional design and implementation of high-impact practices and guided learning pathways that engage diversity and challenge inequities in student outcomes to make excellence inclusive. AAC&U seeks to fully prepare the next generation of strategic leaders and thinkers to advance equity, inclusion, and social justice through higher levels of personal and social responsibility.

Programs

Purposeful Pathways: Faculty Planning for Curricular Coherence

The Purposeful Pathways project supports faculty-led efforts at participating institutions to enhance curricular coherence and intentionality by creating new guided learning pathways. As they move through these newly designed curricular pathways, students will engage in high-quality learning experiences and develop the intellectual skills and practical knowledge they need for life, work, and citizenship.

Strengthening Guided Pathways and Career Success by Ensuring Students Are Learning

The Guided Pathways project supports the efforts of institutional participants to strengthen project-based and applied learning experiences and to assess student achievement of learning outcomes. The project framework is composed of four main practice areas: mapping pathways to student end goals, helping students choose and enter a program pathway, keeping students on path, and ensuring that students are learning.

Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation Campus Centers

In partnership with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation (TRHT) enterprise, AAC&U works with higher education institutions across the country to develop self-sustaining, community-integrated TRHT Campus Centers. Organized around the five pillars of the TRHT framework—narrative change, racial healing and relationship building, separation, law, and economy—the centers seek to prepare the next generation of leaders to confront racism and to dismantle the belief in a hierarchy of human value.

Featured Publications

Paths to Success: How Community Colleges Are Strengthening Guided Pathways to Ensure Students Are Learning

Edited by Tia Brown McNair and Lucie Bonneville

In 2019, twenty community colleges joined Strengthening Guided Pathways and Career Success by Ensuring Students Are Learning, a two-year project led by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. The project draws on the guided pathways framework to support...

Free Download
Making Liberal Education Inclusive: The Roots and Reach of the LEAP Framework for College Learning

By: Carol Geary Schneider

From 2005 to 2018, AAC&U led a national public advocacy and campus-action initiative to champion the importance of a liberal education for individual students and for a nation dependent on economic creativity and democratic vitality. At the heart of the initiative—titled Liberal Education and America’s Promise, or LEAP—was a distinctive framework for
...

Buy Print Copy

Buy Digital Copy
We Hold These Truths: Dismantling Racial Hierarchies, Building Equitable Communities

Edited by Tia Brown McNair

We Hold These Truths describes the work of Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation (TRHT) Campus Centers at colleges and universities across the country to dismantle the tools that perpetuate oppression and entrenched racial...

Buy Print Copy

Buy Digital Copy
From Equity Talk to Equity Walk: Expanding Practitioner Knowledge for Racial Justice in Higher Education

By: Tia Brown McNair, Estela Mara Bensimon and Lindsey Malcom-Piqueux

Drawing from campus-based research projects sponsored by the AAC&U and the Center for Urban Education at the University of Southern California, From Equity Talk to Equity Walk provides practical guidance on the design and application of campus change strategies for achieving equitable outcomes. The authors offer advice on
...

Buy Print Copies
A Vision for Equity

Presenting findings from a three-year project on Committing to Equity and Inclusive Excellence led by AAC&U in partnership with the Center for Urban Education at the University of Southern California, A Vision for Equity shares lessons learned about addressing equity gaps at thirteen participating campuses. This publication...

Download a free PDF
Becoming a Student-Ready College: A New Culture of Leadership for Student Success

By: Tia Brown McNair, Michelle Asha Cooper, Nicole McDonald and Thomas Major, Jr.

To ask whether students are “college-ready” is to concentrate on factors beyond the control of higher education. With this publication, the authors flip the question to provide a new perspective on creating institutional value and facilitating student success. Rather than focusing on student preparedness (or lack thereof), the authors focus...

Buy Print Copies

Resources

Increasing Equity in Higher Education Policy - Center for Urban Education

The Center for Urban Education, in collaboration with the Lumina Foundation, has created a series of tools designed to enable leaders to carry out practices and strategies that will increase equity in higher education policy.

Resources for Responding to Issues of Racial and Social Justice

AAC&U is pleased to share statements and letters from several college and university presidents in response to events regarding issues of racial and social justice. We hope these resources will be helpful as you craft your own responses to these important issues.

Webinars On-Demand

Video recordings of the following webinars are available for AAC&U members to watch on-demand:

Campus Models and Case Studies

See All

A Coordinated Culture of Care: Houston Colleges and Universities Collaborate for Student Success

In an ideal world, every college student would take exactly the number of courses required for their degree. Beyond that, with a few exceptions, each extra course wastes time, costs money, and makes... Read More

“Equity Is Behind All of This”: How Community Colleges Are Strengthening Guided Pathways and Ensuring Students Are Learning

Health Sciences is the most popular academic pathway at Chattanooga State Community College, enrolling more than 40 percent of first-year students each fall. But over the years, many of these... Read More

Association of American Colleges & Universities

A VOICE AND A FORCE FOR LIBERAL EDUCATION