The American Talent Initiative’s Statement of Commitment

Joining the nation’s leading colleges and universities to accelerate opportunity for students from lower-income backgrounds

Ensuring widespread access to a college degree is more critical than ever to ensuring individual economic opportunity, maintaining national competitiveness by addressing future workforce needs, and strengthening democracy through an educated citizenry.

This requires institutional leaders across the higher education continuum to address longstanding disparities in bachelor’s attainment for students from low- and moderate-income households. ATI was founded with a goal to attract, enroll, and graduate thousands of additional lower-income students at the nation’s colleges and universities with six-year graduation rates of at least 70% by 2025.

By signing this Statement:

• I affirm my institution’s commitment to the ATI goal and pledge to commit publicly to aspirational goals for lower-income student opportunity.
• My institution also agrees to support the below goals based on 2019-20, pre-pandemic enrollment data:¹
  • Members with a lower-income enrollment share below 15 percent will aim for an ambitious goal between 15 and 20 percent by 2025, or an equally ambitious increase in the number of lower-income students by 2025.
  • Members with a lower-income student enrollment share between 15 and 20 percent will make measurable progress toward a 20 percent share of lower-income student enrollment or an equally ambitious increase in the number of lower-income students by 2025.
  • Members with a lower-income student enrollment share above 20 percent will aim to at least maintain opportunity for lower-income students at current levels, if not expand enrollment by 2025.
  • All members, regardless of lower-income share, aim to minimize equity-based graduation gaps by 2025.
• My institution commits to making measurable progress² toward our Accelerating Opportunity goal which contributes to ATI’s collective goal of increasing socioeconomic diversity across high-graduation-rate institutions.

To help realize progress toward the above aims, ATI presidents and chancellors will be able to:

• Engage with other ATI presidents and chancellors on shared challenges and successes at the annual ATI Presidential Summit and other opportunities exclusively for ATI presidents
• Dedicate institutional leaders and teams that can access leading higher education experts, tools, research, and resources through our practice-sharing engagements
• Elevate and garner additional support for their successes through the platforms of the Aspen Institute, Ithaka S+R, and Bloomberg Philanthropies.
• Access annual aggregate and institution-specific ATI data reports, which are confidential and customized to compare your institution’s Pell enrollment, graduation, retention, first-generation, and income data to the institution's sector and set of self-selected peers.

Together, we can generate the collective momentum needed to accelerate opportunity for lower-income students across the ATI sector and the nation.

We hope you will join us in this effort.

¹We are committed to increasing access and opportunity for students from the bottom half of the income distribution, which approximately aligns with the eligibility for the Pell grant. We will continue to use the Pell grant to measure ATI’s collective progress towards the Accelerating Opportunity goals. As we move forward, we will consider other ways to measure student enrollment from the bottom half of the income distribution. In measuring an individual institution’s progress, we are open to discussing alternative measures of socioeconomic diversity on a case-by-case basis.

²Measurable progress may include: an increase in the number or share of entering first-time lower-income students, the number of lower-income transfer students, and/or the number or share of continuing/returning lower-income students. These data are already collected as part of the annual ATI data collection. Following consultation with the ATI team, an institution may opt to submit enrollment data by income to demonstrate increases in access for low- and middle-income students, especially those who are near-Pell or who have need, but are ineligible for Pell (e.g., DACA students).