Awarded Grants

This grant supports Digital Promise Global in exploring the impact of a state‐funded training and wage‐based incentive program (Child Care WAGE$ Tennessee) designed to create living‐wage career paths for early childhood educators in rural communities.

This grant supports The RAND Corporation in partnering with Dallas College to address early student attrition. The partners will examine institutional data, student experiences and campus-level practices to share insights with the field about students who leave prior to colleges' official enrollment count and how community colleges can help retain them.

This grant supports Apprenticeships for America in creating the first national network of apprenticeship intermediaries in the United States and developing research to support the role of intermediaries with the goal of expanding apprenticeship opportunities nationwide.

This grant supports Economic Mobility Corporation in partnering with two well-established nonprofit sectoral training providers – Per Scholas and Project QUEST – to evaluate program impacts on low-income learners’ education and labor market outcomes and to identify key program factors associated with positive outcomes.

This grant supports a pooled funding initiative seeking to change the odds of young people living in poverty by directing long-term, substantial resources to organizations with proven impact.

This grant supports CodePath in establishing a body of rigorous evidence about the impacts of its programming at more than 70 colleges and universities, including technical internship placement, completion of degrees in computer science and labor market outcomes for learners from low-income backgrounds.

This grant supports Research Triangle Institute in assessing the evaluation readiness of the Reentry Campus Program (RCP) through a one-year evaluability assessment. This work will assess RCP's operations and data collection to provide them with actionable steps to prepare for a rigorous study of how its approach contributes to positive postsecondary outcomes for currently/previously incarcerated learners.

This grant supports the Community College Research Center in deepening the evidence base across a range of student success reform areas and conducting syntheses of current research in practitioner-oriented briefs and through an update to the pivotal book, “Redesigning America’s Community Colleges,” which launched the national guided pathways movement.

This grant supports the Center on Rural Innovation (CORI) in building pathways to tech employment for learners from low-income backgrounds in rural communities. This investment will help six communities in CORI’s Rural Innovation Network to identify tech employment needs among local employers and design and implement tech training programs designed to meet the needs of rural learners and local employers.

This grant supports Year Up in supporting the implementation and expansion of their centralized program model - training students virtually across multiple geographies with standardized instructional staff, streamlined curriculum, and key in-person touchpoints. Year Up will measure the efficacy of key learner outcomes within the centralized program model compared to its legacy in-person model as they continue expansion. Ascendium's funding will support centralized staff, students in these centralized programs, and Year Up's research and evaluation efforts of this model.