By Jennifer González

Washington

By collecting data on part-time and transfer students, and tracking the progress of low-income students through college, a group of 24 public college and university systems that are collaborating in a project known as Access to Success hope to improve the educational outcomes of those student populations.

Historically, the type of data the institutions are collecting has not been available through the U.S. Department of Education's Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. For example, the federal data system, known as Ipeds, reports only institutional graduation rates, meaning that transfer students who do not graduate from their first institution but do graduate elsewhere are not counted as college graduates. The data collected by Access to Success measures success across all institutions within a system, so that students who transfer between institutions within the same system and graduate are included in the graduation-rate calculation.

Leaders from the two dozen public higher-education systems came together in 2007 to form the group. On Wednesday, the first round of data was released in a report titled "Charting a Necessary Path: The Baseline Report of Public Higher Education Systems in the Access to Success Initiative." The group's work is a project of the National Association of System Heads with support from the Education Trust.

"Students who aren't counted don't count when policies are debated and decisions are made," said Jennifer Engle, who is assistant director of higher education at the Education Trust and a co-author of the report.

The institutions involved in the project have pledged that by 2015 they will halve the gaps in college-going and degree-completion rates that separate low-income students and students of color from others. The institutions comprise 378 two-year and four-year campuses in urban, suburban, and rural settings, and enroll a total of more than three million students.

Numerous projects are already under way on campuses across the country, including college-course redesigns, the strengthening of transfer agreements between two- and four-year colleges, and bridge programs, in which colleges work with high school juniors on math and reading.

Sally Clausen, the Louisiana Board of Regents' commissioner of higher education, said her state was rewarding students who choose to take a full load of classes by reducing their tuition by 10 percent each academic year. She said the state is actually saving money because students are graduating in four years rather than six.