Founded in 2009, Complete College America (CCA) is a nonprofit organization that advocates for dramatically increasing college completion rates and closing institutional performance gaps by working with states, systems, institutions, and partners to scale highly effective structural reforms and promote policies that improve learner success. The CCA vision is a nation where all learners, regardless of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or familial educational achievement, have equal opportunities to access and complete a college education or credential of value. CCA works to ensure postsecondary institutions, policy makers, and systems of higher education welcome, invest in, and support these learners through and to on-time completion. CCA focuses on a three-part approach to shifting policy, perspective, and practice—to ensure lasting change that produces more equitable outcomes for learners.

Examples of areas of focus include:

• Corequisite Support – Provide guidance for leaders implementing the corequisite model for the first time or those who are looking to deepen their practices to address challenges that stand in the way.
• 15 to Finish Initiative – Encourages full-time college learners to complete15 or more credit hours a semester to put them on track to receive an associate degree in two years or a bachelor’s degree in four years.
• Steps to drive equity-driven policy – Beyond Good Intentions provides a guide for states to craft equity-driven policies that are specific, actionable, measurable and well funded. It outlines four major steps states should take when considering and creating new policies.
• No middle ground – Helps colleges assess their practices to improve, identify inequities, address them, and bring everyone at the college into this essential work. Since every action either advances the cause of equity or further entrenches inequities, there is no middle ground.
• Part-time learners must be a full-time priority – Helps colleges understand and act on completion data for both part-time and full-time learners. Part-time learner attainment rates severely lag behind those of their full-time counterparts, regardless of sector or timeframe. Part-time learners are disproportionately BILPOC (Black, Indigenous, Latinx, People of Color) learners, community college learners, and learners ages 25 and older.
• Digital learning infrastructure – CCA and partners of the HBCU Digital Learning Infrastructure (DLI) Initiative are working to shape the way institutions and technologists work together to invest in the policies, practices, and perspectives that both elevate the innovative work happening on HBCU campuses and surface new models for improving the learner outcomes at colleges and universities across the country.