As access to higher education has increased over the past half-century, so has interest in long-term student outcomes like completion, employment, and earnings. Policymakers are increasingly interested in facilitating improvements to these student outcomes; however supporting schools in their efforts to ensure high-quality outcomes and holding schools accountable for when they don’t is complicated, and potential unintended consequences abound. To date, the national higher education field has developed multiple frameworks of metrics, thresholds, and consequences by which different oversight entities could hold institutions accountable for student outcomes. Few proposals, however, provide sufficient detail about how federal, state, or institutional policies can properly coordinate, fund, design, support, and oversee improvement in student outcomes, and ideally do so as a coherent system.

Arnold Ventures, the Gates Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, and Strada Education Foundation are partnering to support the higher education field to develop a more precise set of ideas about how to provide the resources, capacity, and incentives to adequately support continuous and meaningful improvement in student outcomes.

Click here to read the full Request for Proposals.