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

From Equity Talk to Equity Walk

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
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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 details evidence-based interventions focused on improving...

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Becoming a Student-Ready College

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

The national conversation asking "Are students college-ready?" concentrates on numerous factors that are beyond higher education's control. Becoming a Student-Ready College flips the college readiness conversation to provide a new perspective on creating institutional value and facilitating student success. Instead of focusing on student preparedness for college (or lack thereof),...

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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.