Lindsey Wilson College has joined a national effort to improve college students’ success.
The college has joined the Gardner Institute’s Transforming the Foundational Postsecondary Experience initiative. Launched in fall 2023, Transforming the Foundational Postsecondary Experience aims to close performance gaps and improve student success in ways that move toward eliminating factors such as ZIP codes as the best predictors of who graduates.
The initiative is partially funded by support from Ascendium Education Group, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, ECMC Foundation, Lumina Foundation and The Kresge Foundation.
The Gardner Institute initiative started with 11 schools, and Lindsey Wilson is among nine additional schools – five of which are from Kentucky – chosen to participate in the project. The nine additional schools collectively enroll over 19,000 undergraduate students. Nearly half (47%) of the students receive a federal Pell Grant; about one-third (33.4%) of the students identify as either African American, Hispanic, Indigenous or two or more races.
“Lindsey Wilson is proud to be working with the Gardner Institute to improve our student success efforts,” said Lindsey Wilson Vice President for Academic Affairs Ray Lutgring. “Our mission calls for us to ensure that every Lindsey Wilson student has the opportunity to be successful, no matter the challenges they face. The Gardner Institute will help us identify and remove any roadblocks preventing our students from graduating.”
The Kentucky schools in the new cohort – Lindsey Wilson, Bellarmine University, Kentucky State University, Simmons College of Kentucky and Thomas More University – are participating in the work in conjunction with efforts underway with the Kentucky Student Success Collaborative and support from Lumina Foundation.
Over the next five years, the schools will collaborate closely with the Gardner Institute to create and implement strategies aimed at fostering a more successful postsecondary experience.
“By the end of the initiative, institutions are expected to be well on their way to removing demographics and zip codes as the primary determinants of who succeeds in and graduates from college,” said Koch.