Increasing the number and proportion of students completing college-level, aka gateway, courses in their first year is the explicit goal of Strong Start to Finish, an initiative of the Education Commission of the States. In support of meeting that goal, SStF collected curricular information from six higher-education systems across the country and created over 440 individual maps. Three significant takeaways emerged from the hundreds of thousands of data points. We share what we learned to help higher-education systems better understand the structural and institutional barriers created through policies that impact student success and to suggest how they can be addressed.
