For many students being essential workers, worrying about money and experiences in their lives render school irrelevant.

These life experiences offer our students an altogether different set of learning challenges.  Life has put obstacles in their path, but difficult life experiences have afforded them opportunities to learn critical survival and other skills.  These students are smart.

There is a growing population of disproportionately impacted college students who desperately want a college education and have the courage to seek it out, but don’t know how to apply their unique strengths and skills to college.  While many are successfully navigating the Covid pandemic, poverty, rough neighborhoods, and underperforming public school educations, they struggle with a range of academic and personal issues — from a lack of proficiency in math and English to family stresses. They have a strong desire to succeed and are equipped with an extraordinary strength in persistence and survival.  What they are lacking is help in translating their strengths in persistence and survival to the academic environment. Prepared colleges focus on the on-boarding of students so students apply these strengths to the college academic environment and creating a culture of dignity.

When introduced to ACE’s experiential learning activities that reinforce belonging and emotional safety as well as accentuating the student’s inherent strengths, students thrive, succeed and complete their educational goals. Review this summary of longitudinal studies of student academic and salary outcomes.

Colleges need a creative, cost effective way to help students succeed, especially as we recognize that the problem goes far beyond academic preparedness, but also includes affective and non-cognitive approaches that address the root problems of many of our disproportionately impacted students, i.e., their physiological stress-response system and the degree of toxic stress in their lives. Read Reports Referencing the ACE Approach.