The Ascendium Education Group, in partnership with the American Indian College Fund, will be awarding a $2.5 million grant to five tribal colleges and universities (TCUs) to further their work in building meaningful career pathways. This four-year project will focus on implementing and assessing different academic progression and career readiness approaches to determine the best practices for increasing the number of employable American Indian and Alaska Native graduates.

The project will help identify gaps in student success, from academic progression to career readiness, and develop campus-specific solutions. Processes will be developed to collect and refine data to achieve this goal by analyzing every step of a student’s academic career from enrollment and retention to post-graduate employment.

The goal of the project will be to not only better steer students through their studies to employment but to guide the institutional direction of participating TCUs. Each TCU will review current student employment data to identify gaps in programming that support student pathways. The data collected will also provide insight into the employment needs of both rural and tribal communities, potential new or expanded partnerships with employers, and the impact of professional literacy on employment success.

“Our investment aligns with a strategic priority to support innovative programming that promotes upward mobility by connecting rural learners to high-quality jobs,” said Erika Foster, associate program officer at Ascendium. “We look forward to learning how these five TCUs will design and implement career development programming, while building their capacities to understand and monitor outcomes through data.”

College Fund vice president of student success services, Tiffany Gusbeth, said, “We are excited about the opportunity to leverage our work in the Strategic Enrollment Management space and to build it out from academics to career readiness to meet the employment needs of our tribal communities.”