What is Project Compass?
In April 2007, the Nellie Mae Education Foundation launched Project Compass, a multi-year regional initiative to help more underrepresented minority students succeed in and graduate from public four-year institutions of higher education in New England. This initiative will support innovative institutional programs and strategies that strive to eliminate achievement gaps and significantly increase academic success, retention, and graduation rates for minority and low-income undergraduate students.

Eastern's Project Compass: Strategic Support for Student Success

Eastern Connecticut State University seeks Project Compass support to implement its Strategic Support for Student Success initiative. Planning funds will help Eastern develop a multivariate statistical model to refine information about its identified cohort of “underserved” students (low-income, minority, and first generation, full-time undergraduates). With guidance from NERCHE and external consultants, Eastern’s Community of Practice will analyze new data about the needs of the most at-risk students in the cohort, will investigate student success models in the region, and then will develop a comprehensive service delivery strategy to support the cohort’s at-risk students at each stage of their Eastern experience.
Who funds Project Compass?
In 1990, the Nellie Mae Corporation, a nonprofit education-financing company, created the Fund for Education, pioneering philanthropy in the student-loan industry. Over the next eight years, the Fund for Education would provide $5 million in grants to support and advance more than 300 education programs throughout New England. In 1998, the Nellie Mae Foundation was formed; the 1999 purchase of Nellie Mae Corporation by SLM Holding Corporation (Sallie Mae) created the endowment for what is now the Nellie Mae Education Foundation.

Project Compass: Linked with Eastern's Strategic Plan

Eastern's Strategic Plan Initiatives -- the Student Success Center and
Enrollment Management Plan, generated the ideas and background data that
supported the development of Eastern's Project Compass planning year
grant activities for improving retention and graduation rates of 51% of
Eastern's students who are first generation college students, the 38%
who are low-income and receive Pell grants, and the 15-17% who are from
underrepresented minorities in higher education.