Foundation Support

Our Work with Foundations

ACE works with many of the nation’s leading foundations and other organizations to strengthen student success, expand the leadership pipeline, and ensure an equitable, diverse, and resilient higher education sector.

Grants from foundations and other organizations enable ACE to:

Increase degree attainment for adults and other learners by expanding quality assurance for prior learning and modernizing transcripts to align job skills with workforce needs.
Develop and disseminate timely research on pressing issues such the status of race and ethnicity in higher education, the pipeline to the presidency, and other salient topics.
Share policies and practices that support student retention, persistence, and completion and disseminate findings on innovative international higher education strategies.
Facilitate online learning to support research and educational collaborations among colleges and universities both within and outside of the United States.

Impact

ACE thanks our foundation partners for their generous support. Highlights of our efforts include:

With support from the Mellon Foundation, ACE has launched a major research initiative titled Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education: A Status Report. This multi-year project provides foundational data from which the higher education community can draw insights, raise questions, and make the case for why race still matters in American higher education.
In 2015, as part of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-funded Alternative Credit Project, ACE developed a rubric for colleges and universities to assess the quality of non-accredited general education provider courses. The project helped nearly 650 students to leverage no- and low-cost online courses to earn a college degree.
With a grant from Lumina Foundation, ACE is working with Credly, a leading digital credential platform, to create an official digital transcript of workplace skills and education. Learners will be able to easily share the transcript with colleges and universities for academic credit or with employers as a verified record of their knowledge, skills, and competencies.
TIAA Institute generously supports ACE’s American College President Study, the leading and most comprehensive assessment of the college presidency and the higher education leadership pipeline. The 2017 edition includes data on the demographics of college presidents and their career trajectories. For the first time, it also examines presidents’ views in three key areas: diversity and inclusion, state funding and political climate, and areas of importance for the future.

Looking Ahead

Support from foundations and other organizations is critical to our work. With input from our members and other stakeholders, ACE has developed a strategic framework and operating model to guide our efforts in the coming years. Current and emerging initiatives will center on three critical components of higher education’s value proposition for the twenty-first century: equity-minded leadership, institutional transformation, and student success.

ACE looks forward to working with foundations and other organizations across these areas of focus to deliver in-depth research, programs, services, communities, networks, and other partnerships.

Connect With Us

To learn more, please email advancement@acenet.edu.

Foundation Support

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