Pullias Center earns $300K grant to develop college retention campaign

A team of scholars and practitioners will use tech tools to help improve first-year retention rates at CSU Dominguez Hills.

Can digital tools help students persist in college? A new project at the Pullias Center for Higher Education aims to find out.

The ECMC Foundation has awarded a $300,000 grant to the Pullias Center to develop an online campaign to improve college retention rates at California State University–Dominguez Hills. Pullias scholars will work with CSUDH to design, pilot, and evaluate the impact of the digital tool on educational outcomes. The study will also evaluate the potential of digital tools to improve student retention at colleges and universities across the United States. The project will run until June 30, 2019.

“The CSU system is intent on increasing timely graduation rates for their students, many of whom are first generation and historically under-represented in postsecondary spaces,” said Zoë Corwin, research associate professor at the Pullias Center. “We are excited to have the opportunity to collaborate with CSUDH on an innovative approach to decreasing summer melt and increasing first year persistence.”

The campaign will offer first-year students information and strategies about transitioning to and succeeding in college. Pullias researchers will work in partnership with Get Schooled, a nonprofit that employs media, technology and popular culture to improve high school graduation and college-going rates.

The Pullias team won’t be starting their work from scratch for this 18-month project. In fact, the novel digital college success tool will be a tweak on the college-going digital tools the team created in recent years — including Mission: Admission Challenge, a game-based program to incentivize high school students to apply for college admission and financial aid. That approach, funded by a $3.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education, was shown to improve school-level FAFSA application completion rates by seven percent.

The ECMC Foundation grant allows Pullias researchers to extend their work, studying the role of game-based learning on college aspirations and college-going efficacy with the aim to support first-generation and underserved students as they learn about, apply to, and attend college.

“We are interested in how this grant extends work we’ve been doing with high schools to a college audience,” said William G. Tierney, co-director of the Pullias Center. “The opportunity to collaborate with practitioners and students on impactful work is particularly significant.”

The new grant builds upon the digital equity research funded by the US Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education’s First in the World grant, the US Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation and the TG Foundation. The project began with internal support from the Office of the Provost at USC.