The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) and Temple University have released a guide for higher ed institutions on how to implement completion grants for their students.
Dr. Christel Perkins
Completion grants are funds given to students who need them to finish out their degree or academic journey.
The APLU and its sister organization, the Coalition of Urban Serving Universities, partnered with Temple University’s Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice for a five-year, randomized control trial (RCT) to study completion grants at 11 APLU institutions, an endeavor funded through a grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s (ED) Institute for Education Science (IES).
This practitioner’s guide was partially funded through that grant, said Dr. Christel Perkins, USU deputy executive director, APLU assistant vice president, and primary author of the guide.
"This guide was meant to be a companion, so it's also funded through the grant, so it's directly related and a deliverable from the grant,” Perkins said. “But it really focused more on how are universities currently using completion grants post-RCT. It's really more of the qualitative description of completion grants implementation."
Although the RCT study found that completion grants did not improve graduation rates over three years, most of the 11 schools in question continue offering them, many have changed implementation methods, and many have since indicated positive effects on completion, according to the guide. As such, the guide is meant to examine these effects qualitatively on the seven schools who opted to share how completion grants are being implemented on their campuses.
"We really want to be encouraging our members to think very critically about the types of innovations and practices that they are implementing at their universities,” Perkins said. “And as we mention in the guide and in the research, completion grants have been growing in popularity, and ... we don't want [our institutions] to just adopt something because it's popular. We really want them to increase student success by really increasing the evidence base there."
