Vision 2020 is a small grants program that focuses campus attention, creativity, and resources on increasing student success. This program serves as an incubator that will provide resources, information, and encouragement to project teams who have good ideas for increasing student learning, engagement, and other predictors of student persistence, retention, and timely graduation. Projects are funded for a pilot year and for up to two years of implementation. After that point, successful projects will seek internal funding as a line in the base budget, or external funding. These successful projects will have several years of outcome data, which should help them make a strong case for funding as a line in the base budget, or external funding. Vision 2020 grants will also increase the use of assessment data in making programming decisions and increase collaboration across campus.
The fundamental requirement is that Vision 2020 projects are likely to improve student success and that they will include an effective assessment program. Beyond that, projects may be large or small in scope, targeting a large group of students (e.g. all freshmen) or a smaller group (e.g. parents, or minority students). Projects could directly target student retention (e.g. calls to students who have not enrolled for the next semester) or could target a variable that is known to lead to retention (e.g. learning communities or active learning strategies).
