DEI - Development Education Initiative

Welcome

The Developmental Education Initiative is a three-year effort begun in 2009 to identify and develop programs that increase the number of community college students who complete preparatory classes and successfully move on to college-level studies. Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Lumina Foundation for Education, it includes 15 colleges and six states that were early participants in the Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count initiative. This password-protected Web site is an essential part of creating a learning community where participating colleges and states can share questions, answers, discoveries, and challenges.

Latest News

7/21/2010 read more »
Remedial education is logjam on path to a degree
7/13/2010 read more »
New Approach to the Need for Remedial Education
6/24/2010 read more »
Community Colleges Cutting Back on Open Access
Read All News

DEI Member Forums

Sharing questions, discoveries and successes is a key to helping colleges in DEI develop effective programs and practices. The forums allow participating schools to ask questions, share documents, and comment on each other’s work.

LATEST TOPICS

Here are a few of the conversations taking place in the forums

DEI Webinar Topic Suggestions

 

This year, we will launch a series of webinars and conference calls for DEI participants. These events will give us an opportunity to connect between face-to-face meetings, hear presentations from relevant practitioners, share successes, and troubleshoot challenges together. Possible topics include:
·         Techniques for scaling interventions
·         Evaluation of interventions and institutional policy changes
·         Integration of DEI interventions and institutional policy changes
·         Alignment of developmental education and adult basic education.
 
Are there other topics you would like to discuss or learn about?

 

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Cost-Benefit of Student Success Initiatives

In 2007, Jobs for the Future launched the one-year pilot of Investing in Student Success as part of the national Making Opportunity Affordable initiative. Student success programs have proliferated on many college campuses, but cost-effectiveness is rarely given consideration in their development and evaluation. By taking cost into account, administrators could better judge the actual pay-off of a program in terms of retention and graduation. This type of analysis allows for continuous program improvement that emphasizes productivity as well as quality and access.

Investing in Student Success (ISS) developed a Cost-Return Calculator to calculate the average costs per student of a student success program and compare those costs to gains in student retention. The ISS pilot demonstrated the usefulness of this tool for resource allocation, but also found that many institutions have poorly developed metrics for comparing spending to performance. The initiative’s report is available on the resources section of the DEI Web site. You can also link to Inside Higher Ed commentary on the report in the “News” section.

What implications do you think this report has for determining the cost-benefit of developmental education programs?
 

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The DEI Directory

Key to the Developmental Education Initiative is having colleges learn from each other, and from experts in the field when necessary. Click here for a listing of all colleges and state participants View the directory and their contact information, and also for a complete list of Technical Assistance Providers who are available to consult with colleges on issues such as organizational development and curriculum redesign.

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