Scaling Student Success: Lessons from the Gates Foundation Grant
Sep 19, 2025Every institution talks about “student success.” The real challenge is doing it at scale.
At Rio Salado College, Dr. Jennifer Brock and her colleagues faced exactly that question. With tens of thousands of students — many of them adult learners, working parents, or first-generation college-goers — how could the college deliver the kind of personal support that helps students persist?
The answer came through a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. With those resources, Rio Salado built what Jennifer calls a “holistic way of supporting students at scale.” The initiative combined multiple elements:
- Rio Compass, a student portal for goal tracking, advisor connections, and progress monitoring.
- Early alerts, which pulled data from grades, help desk calls, and faculty notes to flag students who might be at risk.
- Predictive analytics, to proactively identify challenges before they became barriers.
- Student success help desks staffed with advisors and peer mentors.
The results were striking: persistence rates rose by nearly 12 percentage points and course success rates by 9 points compared to a control group. The model worked — and even drew a visit from Bill Gates himself.
The lesson for higher education leaders? Scale requires both technology and people. Data-driven systems can point to where help is needed, but the human connection — the advisor, the peer mentor, the caring faculty member — makes the real difference.
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