All Grants

This grant supports Per Scholas in bringing to scale their technology workforce training and professional development model to tens of thousands more learners and hundreds more employer partners throughout the U.S. Ascendium’s investment will support Per Scholas in their efforts to build new partnerships to better reach learners, deepen its bench of highly-qualified instructors and redesign its recruitment and admissions processes to be more learner friendly.

This grant supports the University of Tennessee's Grow Your Own Center in enabling postsecondary institutions to launch competency-based teacher apprenticeship programs that reach rural regions and learners throughout the state. Through the launch of the Institute for Competency-Based Teacher Education, postsecondary institutions will have access to standardized, competency-based materials and assessments that will ensure more rural learners can engage in and complete apprenticeship-based degree programs that provide a pathway to teaching jobs in rural school districts.

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 National Center for Inquiry and Improvement (NCII) in replicating the Ohio Leadership Academy for Student Success in two to three additional states. NCII will work with selected states to implement key elements of the Ohio model for providing targeted training for leaders within community colleges, thereby building state- and system-level capacity to implement wide-scale strategies for student success.

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 launching a new Google Career Certificates training program in two locations—Austin, Texas, and Seattle, Washington—as a complement to its traditional one-year, tuition-free training model. Year Up will pilot the Google Career Certificates training, combined with a shared outcomes financing plan, and assess the potential of the model for scaling to reach more learners.

This grant supports Hudson Link for Higher Education in Prison Inc in expanding its programming to more students transitioning from in-prison to free-world postsecondary education. It will also enable Hudson Link to engage in a formative evaluation to improve its services and share lessons learned with other program operators.

This grant supports MDRC in engaging in a continuous cycle of rigorous research, active dissemination and hands-on technical assistance that builds the capacity of colleges and workforce training providers to improve outcomes for learners from low-income backgrounds.

This grant supports The Aspen Institute College Excellence Program in supporting a cohort of 10 community colleges to implement policy and practice reforms that will increase the postgraduation success of their students, namely students of color and learners from low-income backgrounds.

This grant supports the Jesuit Prison Education Network (JPEN), a nationwide coalition of Jesuit colleges, in developing best practices and sharing resources to strengthen postsecondary education in prison programs across the network. JPEN and its research center, the Jesuit Social Research Institute, will strengthen the capacity of member programs to evaluate their programs and build capacity for continuous improvement.