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The FIPSE grant supported the organizational expansion of College Summit by significantly strengthening the technological infrastructure that will enable service to a growing number of users. With the support of technology, College Summit’s college access model has become systemic, sustainable, cost-effective, and replicable.
During a four-year period, funding enabled College Summit to initially enhance its existing online tool, CSNet; and then, when that tool’s limitations were recognized, to research the market and identify and contract with a state-of-the-art external vendor (Xap/Bridges) to design and develop a new tool, branded CSNav, that is being piloted in three schools/nine classrooms and is already yielding positive preliminary feedback. Learnings from this pilot will inform the rollout of the new tool for the 2008-09 school year. As a result of the grant, College Summit now has the technological infrastructure and capacity to support the delivery of its college access system to 20,000 students in 2008-09, an exponential increase from the 2,300 that were served at the beginning of the grant period.
Technology is considered critical to College Summit, an organization with aggressive aspirations for scaling from its current service of 13,000 students across the nation to 100,000 students over the next five years. Such a rapid growth trajectory requires operational savvy about which processes must scale up by adding resources and which processes can scale up in a leveraged fashion, thus allowing the cost-per-student touched to decline with growth. The investment in technology made possible by the FIPSE grant has not only been key to directly providing much of the leveraged growth, but College Summit is now leveraging technology to address project and process issues across the entire organization.
The College Summit mission is to increase college enrollment in low-income communities by equipping school and school district partners with a system of tools, resources, and expertise to increase college enrollment rates school-wide. Supported and enabled by technology, the model -
- Embeds a mandatory college planning course in the school schedule using a curriculum and online resource center to support and guide students through the postsecondary planning process;
- Trains and mobilizes peer influencers at summer workshops to help build a college-going culture;
- Provides professional development/on-site support for educators to raise student outcomes; and
- Delivers customized reports featuring actionable data on student, classroom, and school progress toward achieving college enrollment goals.
ONLINE REFERENCES:
College Summit
http://www.collegesummit.org
CSNav
http://beta.csnav.org/
CSNet
http://csnet.collegesummit.net/csnet/sp/Login
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Kevin O'Shaughnessey
Project Director
College Summit
1763 Columbia Road NW
Second Floor
Washington, DC 20009
Tel: 202-319-1763 x424
Fax: 202-319-1233
Pat Simons
College Summit
1763 Columbia Road NW
Washington, DC 20009
Tel: 202.319.1763 ext. 299
Fax: 202-319-1233
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