Since 2023, the Urban Institute has been documenting how colleges in the ACE-UP community of practice developed strategies to encourage student academic and career success and boost employer engagement. As the ACE-UP community of practice comes to an end, this brief builds on existing findings and highlights new approaches ACE-UP colleges are implementing to support their students.

Why This Matters

Students from underrepresented communities face systemic barriers to upward mobility, such as unmet basic needs and a lack of access to career development opportunities. Colleges participating in ACE-UP aimed to design and elevate strategies that bolster students’ academic and career outcomes. In this final brief, we uplift promising strategies, lessons learned, and recommendations for sustaining this work. These findings are important, as colleges continue to prioritize student success, even amid federal and state policy changes that limit work explicitly focused on advancing equity.

What We Found

In 2022, Corporation for a Skilled Workforce (CSW) launched Advancing Community Equity and Upward Mobility (ACE-UP). CSW developed a framework of five elements of success to support ACE-UP colleges in advancing student success, including optimizing employer partnerships, enhancing student services, including career services, aligning policy and practice, making data-driven decisions, and advancing institutionalized equity. ACE-UP colleges shared examples of successes and challenges faced while developing goals aligned with these elements of success. The colleges also reflected on their experience in the community of practice and shared key lessons learned and recommendations for sustaining this work:

• Adapt institutional goals, strategy, and communications about advancing student success as necessary to comply with evolving federal and state policy that limits work on equity. College staff shared how they have changed their approach (for example, focusing on "access for all") to comply with federal and state policies preventing the use of funding for DEIA initiatives. They shared how they have maintained critical service delivery amid funding constraints while complying with federal and state policies.
• Use data to inform decisionmaking and demonstrate results. Analyzing data on student outcomes, as well as communicating results with staff and faculty, was seen as important for implementing policies to help students persist through their academic programs.
• Leverage multiple funding streams to sustain grant initiatives. Representatives from multiple colleges participating in ACE-UP emphasized that limited funding was a challenge. Braiding funding across multiple sources can help sustain initiatives that promote student success.
• Engage employers to increase student access to employment and career advancement. College staff shared that employer partnerships helped their students access work-based learning opportunities like apprenticeships and internships.
• Participate in communities of practice and national networks for peer learning. The ACE-UP community of practice was helpful for idea-sharing, problem-solving, and peer-learning. ACE-UP colleges appreciated having a space to share experiences with colleagues and identify innovative approaches to promote student achievement.

How We Did It

In summer 2025, the research team fielded a final survey to participating colleges about progress toward the goals college identified as part of ACE-UP. College staff were also prompted to share examples of successes and challenges that impacted their progress. In the survey, Urban researchers asked college teams to indicate if they were interested in participating in a 45-minute follow-up interview to supplement their survey responses and provide additional context about successful strategies and barriers faced. We held interviews with five out of 11 survey respondents in June and July 2025.