What is Project Success

Minority-serving institutions (MSIs)—including Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-serving institutions (AANAPISIs), historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs), predominantly black institutions (PBIs), and tribal colleges and universities (TCUs)—play an important role in higher education in the U.S. While MSIs provide access to many underserved segments of the college-going population, with greater resources, these institutions could broaden their support of those students.

To support MSIs and the students they educate and empower, Federal Student Aid (FSA) developed a program—Project Success—aimed at strengthening student outcomes and institutional performance at MSIs.

Project Success pairs guaranty agencies (GAs) with participating MSIs to help the schools identify student risk factors affecting graduation, retention, and cohort default rates. Together, GAs and MSIs develop proactive strategies, which could include financial assistance to students, to minimize risk through collective best practices. Participating schools do not pay for services provided by GAs, but the schools are required to assign staff to work with the GAs during the program.

To track the impact that project success has on the participating schools, we will need a set of historical student data as well as data for consecutive semesters.