Promoting At-Promise Student Success through Ecological Validation

Higher education often struggles to meet the needs of at-promise students—that is, those from low-income, first-generation, and racially minoritized backgrounds (Kitchen et al., 2021). Colleges and universities graduate students from these backgrounds at much lower rates than their peers despite myriad efforts over the decades to remedy these inequities (Cataldi et al., 2018; Shapiro et al., 2018; Tinto, 2012). The failures of colleges and universities to significantly improve at-promise student success in meaningful ways results from one-size-fits all approaches to student support, siloed and difficult-to-navigate campus environments, and deficit-oriented campus cultures where educators treat at-promise students and their needs as problems that need fixing to “fit the mold” of a successful college student. Leaders in higher education continue to wrestle with these seemingly intractable disparities, and many have piloted novel models to support at-promise students as they navigate postsecondary education.