How 3.0 Colleges Change Lives

Journalist Nicholas Kristof, when asked recently why he remained an optimist, noted that the public can get a skewed sense of the state of the world from the headlines—reporters mainly cover plane crashes, not the thousands of planes that safely land every day. So it is with the coverage of higher education, particularly this year.?

Negative headlines certainly don’t tell the full story. While we hear criticism or skepticism about colleges and universities, a recent Lumina Foundation and Gallup report,?the State of Higher Education 2024, found that American adults overwhelmingly believe in the value of higher education, particularly as an avenue for career advancement.?

In this newsletter, we’ll celebrate the 20 community colleges chosen as semifinalists for the 2025 Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence. These schools have a lot to teach the field about instituting reforms that develop talent and advance economic mobility through a college education. We’ll also share a new case study about one of those semi-finalists—and a finalist for last year’s Aspen Prize—that used a negative accreditation report as the impetus to rapidly develop an institution-wide model to improve teaching and learning in every course, every semester.?We’ll?also?share a terrific new book by Aspen President Dan Porterfield that spotlights the lasting impact residential liberal arts colleges can have on student mindsets and success. Before leading Aspen, Dan was president of Franklin & Marshall College and did field-leading work advancing socio-economic diversity and talent.?Finally, we highlight the important ongoing work by CCRC in advancing strong and equitable dual enrollment pathways.

What these?four?stories have in common: they’re about colleges that change lives through excellent practices.???

The Aspen Institute College Excellence Program is committed to sharing successful practices from these and other colleges through our leadership programs, close work with college teams, and the development of playbooks and other tools for the field. Stay tuned to this newsletter for more examples in the months to come.?

Best, Joshua Wyner

Vice President, The Aspen Institute and Founder & Executive Director, Aspen Institute College Excellence Program

Aspen Names 20 Semifinalists for the 2025 Aspen Prize

The $1 million Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence is recognized nationally as the leading award for community colleges committed to access, completion, and post-graduate success. The 20 institutions selected this spring as semifinalists for the 2025 Prize stand out among more than 1,000 community colleges as having high and improving levels of student success, as well as equitable outcomes for Black and Hispanic students and those from lower-income backgrounds. Find the full list of semifinalists and more on the Aspen Prize?here —and don’t forget to check our?website on June 11?(and our?next newsletter)?for the list of ten finalists! After visits to those ten colleges and much more data gathering and analysis, the winner will be selected and announced in April 2025. Thanks to our partners at the National Center for Inquiry and Innovation, our 18-member expert panel who selected the finalists, and Aspen Prize funders Ascendium Education Group , The Joyce Foundation , and The Kresge Foundation .

Excellence in Teaching & Learning Reform

While many colleges have worked to advance completion rates at scale, our research uncovers fewer that have made collegewide changes to teaching practices that lead to better learning outcomes. Meet 2023 Aspen Prize Finalist (and 2025 Semifinalist) Southwest Wisconsin Technical College . After a very negative accreditation report citing inadequate efforts to monitor and improve student learning, SWTC implemented an across-the-college system designed to improve students’ learning and classroom experiences.?Now, every faculty member assesses learning in every course, every semester, making plans to improve areas of weakness and reporting on the results of those efforts the following semester.?And faculty throughout the college are able to cite specific changes made in classroom teaching and the results on student learning. The college saw an increase in the combined graduation and transfer rate from 51 to 61 percent over the first six years that this reform was implemented. Interested in learning more? Read our new case study by Senior Research Manager Konrad Mugglestone, PhD , “Building a Scaled Culture of Continuous Improvement in Teaching and Learning at SWTC.”

The Impact of the Residential College Experience on Student Mindset

As a senior college leader for many years, Aspen Institute President and CEO Dan Porterfield understood that colleges leave talent on the table when they fail to enroll students from all backgrounds and every income level. As the president of Franklin & Marshall, Dan helped develop and implement a “talent strategy” that resulted in dramatic increases in the number of enrolled Pell students–and he saw that talent bloom among the increasingly diverse students coming to his college. Those experiences played an integral role in the creation of the?American Talent Initiative and led to his new book?Mindset?Matters , which makes a powerful case for the value of residential undergraduate education in developing growth mindsets among students to help them thrive in disruptive times. The release date is June 25; readers can preorder the book?here .

Partner Highlight

The Aspen Institute?has?collaborated?with the Community College Research Center on several projects, including a 2020 playbook on dual enrollment . CCRC?has?continued?its efforts to help the field understand?dual enrollment?and the practices that result in high and equitable levels of student success,?and has worked?with community colleges and their K-12 partners to extend equity-focused guided pathways practices to students from underserved groups. Read CCRC’s latest?policy factsheet on dual enrollment ?to learn more about their findings.

Aspen Institute College Excellence Program and American Talent Initiative in the News

• The Aspen Institute Names Semifinalists for Aspen Prize - ?Diverse: Issues in Higher Education
• Your View: 80 years after the GI Bill, US needs similar approach for college students - The Morning Call
• To support underserved students, four-year universities offer two-year associate degrees - The Hechinger Report
• 20 colleges named Aspen Prize semi-finalists - Community College Daily
• Drexel offers tuition discount for community college grads - The Philadelphia Tribune
• Guest Commentary: Investment in students creates opportunity - The Daily Star

Visit our website for more information about Aspen’s higher education projects, research, and fellowship applications. Follow us on social media for more news and updates. And if you found this newsletter of value, please share with your channels–you can also subscribe here to receive the newsletter directly to your email inbox.

Have questions? Reach out to Tatiana Johnson , Communications Associate, [email protected] .