View the 2023 Center Year in Review to celebrate our collective accomplishments in 2023. We are looking forward to continuing our support of Michigan’s 31 public and tribal community colleges in 2024.
The Michigan Center for Student Success provides state-level support to Michigan’s community colleges by serving as a hub connecting leadership, administrators, faculty, and staff in their emerging and ongoing efforts to improve equitable student outcomes, emphasizing linkages between practice, research, and policy.
Our values determine our actions and define our commitment to equitable student success. We maintain a relentless focus on ensuring that coherence, equity, evidence and innovation are infused across all strategies and strands of our work.
Coherence: Align initiatives to develop a comprehensive strategy to improve student success and enable collaboration among Michigan’s community colleges, national partners, policymakers, state agencies, universities, K-12, employers, and community-based organizations.
Equity: Eliminate barriers and increase opportunities for all students while addressing persistent inequities for historically marginalized students for whom higher education has traditionally been inaccessible and unwelcoming.
Evidence: Organize, synthesize and disaggregate data from institutional, local, state and national sources to identify equity gaps, accelerate adoption of evidence-based student success reforms, and assess the effectiveness of interventions.
Innovation: Foster creative approaches to the systemic problems facing higher education, promote evidence-based practices and enable supportive policy solutions that meet the local needs of community colleges.
These strategies describe our tactical approach to improving equitable student success in Michigan. We actively create opportunities, connect stakeholders and champion evidence-based practices and policy solutions in every area of our work.
Create: In collaboration with Michigan’s community colleges and other partners, design evidence-based initiatives and other opportunities to substantially improve equitable student outcomes while meeting the needs of Michigan’s community colleges.
Connect: Promote collaboration among community colleges to implement reforms, share successful practices and navigate challenges. Organize high-quality convenings to connect college practitioners and other stakeholders and serve as a hub to facilitate emerging opportunities for campus-based work and the integration of findings from national projects.
Champion: Contribute expertise to ongoing policy conversations about addressing educational inequities, increasing access to higher education and credential attainment, providing holistic student support and expanding the use of data to support student success reform efforts across Michigan’s community colleges.