How a Postsecondary Student Success Grant Propels Data-Driven Action at UT San Antonio

At the University of Texas at San Antonio (UT San Antonio), a bipartisan federal grant designed to boost college completion is helping campus leaders identify strategies that support students who are the first in their families to attend college thrive on campus and in their studies.

Since 2022, the Postsecondary Student Success Grant (PSSG), administered by the U.S. Department of Education, has awarded 22 colleges, universities, and non-profit organizations grants to implement promising approaches or expand proven models for supporting student success. Students in 12 states including Texas, New Jersey, South Carolina, Oklahoma and Colorado, are benefiting from evidence-based strategies that improve retention, transfer, and completion.

PSSG has received strong support from both parties over the last four years, including $45 million in the most recent fiscal year 2026 funding law. Last month, House Appropriators included $45 million for the PSSG program in their fiscal year 2027 funding proposal. Additional, dedicated federal investment would help scale these strategies to more campuses and reach more students.

IHEP recently sat down with the two leaders at UT San Antonio, Tammy Wyatt, Senior Vice Provost for Student Success, and Mark Appleford, Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Studies, to learn more about its PSSG program, Navigate. Navigate connects first-generation, first-year students from low-income backgrounds with success coaches to support their transition to college and access to campus resources. Participants also complete learning pathways and receive financial incentives for their engagement in coaching sessions and other Navigate activities. Students who complete all program requirements receive an additional $500 retention grant.

One year into Navigate’s implementation, PSSG funding is helping UT San Antonio leverage data to boost student success and build evidence on what works to improve student outcomes.

External evaluation provides rigorous and actionable evidence

PSSG grantees are not only funded to implement or expand evidence-based practices, they must also engage external evaluators to assess program outcomes and expand the shared knowledge base about what strategies support student success.

“One of the most valuable components of PSSG is that it holds us accountable to high reporting standards and insists that we use an external partner to conduct a rigorous independent analysis,” Appleford said.

To conduct this analysis of Navigate, UT San Antonio has partnered with Education Northwest (EDNW). Their evaluation will be methodologically rigorous and meet What Works Clearinghouse standards “without reservations.” This means any observed impacts on student outcomes can be credited to the Navigate program, not a coincidence or a result of who chose to participate.

Studies that meet these high standards are essential for understanding effective higher education practices but are time and resource intensive. PSSG’s emphasis on rigorous external evaluations, including providing funds to support them, made the partnership between UT San Antonio and EDNW possible. Findings from UT San Antonio and other PSSG grantee evaluations will be available to the field via ERIC, the Education Resources Information Center.

Evaluation insights inform real-time improvements

Findings from EDNW’s forthcoming initial evaluation shed light on how Navigate serves students. It revealed Navigate students were more likely than non-Navigate students to strongly agree that they feel like they belong at UT San Antonio (58 percent compared with 10 percent, respectively) and their sense of belonging grew over the course of the year. Research demonstrates that when students feel they belong in their college community, their academic performance, mental health and wellbeing, and retention improve.

Other findings indicate there are ways the program can be strengthened. And the UT San Antonio Navigate team is putting those insights into action now. “We have standard measures and scalability measures that we’re regularly assessing and discussing to determine what we can and should be changing to support students and make improvements,” Appleford explained. These improvements include beginning outreach earlier in the academic year to boost engagement and ensure students have support in place before common college transition challenges arise.

The Navigate team is also refining learning pathways, as well as the training activities that help students build study and time management skills and expose them to support available on campus. Student feedback in year one emphasized the importance of pathway content but raised timing challenges. The Navigate team will address student feedback by implementing uniform pacing guides that minimize conflicts with busy periods like midterms and finals.

Detailed analyses lead to findings that can be applied across campus

EDNW evaluation results reveal that Navigate students are far more likely than non-Navigate students to agree or strongly agree they are confident they’ve chosen the right major (95 percent compared with 60 percent, respectively). Appleford described this finding as, “huge for us in thinking about how to scale what’s working in Navigate across different programs at the university.”

That’s because one of the top predictors of student success and thriving at UT San Antonio is certainty in academic major. “When students feel more confident in their major, their thriving score is higher,” Wyatt shared. Major certainty is one of several key indicators of student thriving that Wyatt, Appleford, and their team track for all UT San Antonio students regardless of whether they participate in Navigate.

PSSG supports rigorous analyses and a deeper understanding of how the Navigate program is strengthening major certainty for participants. But the value of those insights extends beyond Navigate and can inform how to better serve all UT San Antonio students and postsecondary students more broadly. “Our goal is to use data to identify those things that work really well for first-generation, first-time students in Navigate and take them to scale,” said Wyatt.

Federal policymakers can ensure more students benefit from the PSSG program

To promote shared learning, the Department of Education should provide opportunities for PSSG grantees to convene to share best practices, early findings, and strategies for success. The Department of Education can also synthesize and elevate findings from PSSG grantees to boost their reach and ensure decisionmakers nationwide can access new insights about what works to support student success.

To expand the impact of PSSG, federal lawmakers should deepen investments in the program in the fiscal year 2027 funding plan. IHEP joined more than 30 researchers and other partners in calling for $55 million in PSSG program funding in the upcoming federal appropriations cycle. Members of Congress can also support the bicameral Postsecondary Student Success Act to authorize and provide dedicated federal funding for the program.

UT San Antonio’s Navigate program shows that when federal dollars fund both promising practices and rigorous evaluation, the result is real, measurable gains for students. Continued and expanded investment in PSSG would put that proven approach within reach for more campuses and students nationwide.