As we announce the merger of the Center for Enrollment Research, Policy and Practice (CERPP) with the Pullias Center for Higher Education, we reflect on both centers’ histories of deep engagement with questions of practice and our long-time partnerships with communities of professionals. We are unique among academic research centers of higher education in each having a purposeful focus on research-practice partnerships (RPP’s) — so much so that we see this as becoming an anchor to our collective strategy for educational impact.
Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) are defined by the W.T. Grant Foundation as long-term, mutually-beneficial collaborations that promote the production and use of research. Unlike research that settles for extracting data from individuals in hopes of being in conversation and community with other researchers, RPP’s are designed for relevance.
Across their respective life spans, both centers have run — and continue to run — more RPP’s than we could illustrate in a single column. And both centers’ origins involved partnerships with under-resourced high schools aimed at improving both college going and access.
Pullias’ history with research-practice partnerships dates to the Center’s beginning, via a partnership with ten local high schools in the most poverty-stricken part of Los Angeles with the lowest college-going rates. The project focused on the challenge of better understanding what prevented students from being successful in these schools and what could improve their chances. Led by founding director Bill Tierney, the project was the first of many to take an asset-based approach, emphasizing not students’ need to change, but schools’ need to create college-going cultures.
CERPP’s origins at USC also lay in efforts to create college-going cultures in high schools across southern California. As an extension of CERPP’s mission for greater equity and expertise in education access, the USC College Advising Corps (CAC) was launched in 2013. The Corps supports first-generation, low-income students to attend college by hiring and training college advisers to work full time at local public high schools. The CAC now spans L.A. County with nearly 40 advisers placed at ten districts — from Bellflower to Compton and Los Angeles to West Covina. Built to work at scale, it supports an average of 10,000 high school seniors each year and has directly assisted more than 88,000 first generation, low-income and underrepresented students since its inception.
Another longtime partnership has been with the Los Angeles Community College District to help improve student placements in developmental education. Over time, that also extended to creating ways to improve developmental education, particularly in math, which has become a substantial barrier to students’ progress. The partnership continues even as our dear colleague Tatiana Melguizo passed away in 2024. Our longtime colleague Federick Ngo will continue this work, moving from University of Nevada, Las Vegas to USC Rossier in 2026.
Since 2016, the Equity in Graduate Education team at the Pullias Center has been shaping the national dialogue about how to improve graduate education by driving a cycle of community-informed research that informs high-quality faculty professional development. Following the collective impact model, the NSF-funded Inclusive Graduate Education Network brought together researchers and STEM disciplinary societies, including a Research Hub operated from Pullias. The Equity in Graduate Education Consortium now connects 24 universities and nearly 200 graduate programs to support institutional change in three areas: Admissions and Recruitment, Mentoring and Wellbeing, and Equitable Selection Systems.
Partnership with the Susan T. Buffett Foundation and the University of Nebraska System with the Promoting At-promise Student Success project helps low-income, first generation and racially-minoritized college students to be successful. This more than 10-year partnership involves studying a learning community program aimed at college transition and scaling the promising practices from these programs to the larger campus to increase the impacts of these successful programs.
These and other experiences tell us that RPPs are not only a tried and true means of connecting the work of research, policy and practice, but are paths to real innovation and continuous improvement in facilitating student access and success. By working more collaboratively, researchers are not limited by the echo chamber in the ivory tower. They are better equipped to understand local contexts, produce policy-relevant insights and support the expertise of professionals on the ground. And when practitioners are involved in inspiring and translating research, they are more likely to get what they need from the academy — actionable, accessible data and real thought partnership.
We hear regularly how hungry administrators are for data that they can bring to senior management to inform local conversations. And it’s no surprise: rapid changes in the law and how it is being interpreted, new approaches to financial aid, and attacks on immigrant and other racialized communities mean that college access is subject to real threats. Timely access to trustworthy knowledge is more important than ever, and the Pullias Center is well-positioned to stand out in offering this to the postsecondary ecosystem.
