ACE President Ted Mitchell: Student Success is Higher Education’s Bread and Butter

Dozens of higher education leaders came together last week on consecutive days in Washington, DC, and Chicago to launch the National Student Success Project, a diverse and growing group of colleges and universities committed to taking action to help students achieve their full potential before and after graduation.

The National Student Success Project (NSSP) addresses practical concerns from students and families about the value of a college degree by spelling out five core commitments that represent an action agenda for American higher education. The project was organized starting in early 2026, and its work has been guided by an advisory board of 19 presidents and chancellors representing a broad cross-section of higher education:

Five higher education associations helped launch the project at an initial event Oct. 22 in DC: the American Association of Community Colleges, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, the American Council on Education, the Association of American Universities, and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. Strada Education Foundation supports the project. An NSSP launch event also was held the next day in Chicago during the Association of Community College Trustees Leadership Congress.

When ACE President Ted Mitchell spoke during the DC launch event, he stressed that this is an important milestone for all of higher education and our students. Here are his complete remarks:

ACE President Ted Mitchell: Despite what people said we couldn’t do, today marks a day when higher education has truly come together as a sector.

Around you, you’ll see people who have been supportive of this from virtually every association that represents higher education. You’ll hear later from our colleagues from AAU, APLU and AASCU, who have been our partners. Tomorrow, we’ll be in Chicago at the convening of the Community College Trustees Association, and we will celebrate the community colleges’ involvement.

But to be clear, this is a project that includes everyone, and we want this group to be the start of everyone. So we’re starting with a document, we’re expanding to a coalition, we want to move on to a movement, and so that’s one of the things that I find so special about today.

Today is also the day that that group, higher education as a sector, is going to start playing offense. We’re done. There’s certainly a lot of defense still to be played, but we are not going to win back the hearts and the minds of the American people by playing defense.

We’re going to win back the hearts and minds of the American people, we’re going to raise the confidence levels of Americans in higher education by going on offense, and it’s not just telling small bits of our story better. It’s about reminding America who we are and what we do and who we do our work for.

So the third thing that I’m excited about today is that we have identified student success as that thing. Student success, as I’ve said a number of times around the country, student success is what earns us the right to do everything else we do.

If we don’t get student success right, our research programs are going to wither, our community engagement is going to go away, the ability to provide resources around the world will continue to diminish. Student success is our bread and butter, and so that’s the third thing that excites me about today.

The fourth thing. . .I’m also excited because today gives us a chance to right a wrong that we’ve been struggling with for a while. I think that my surprise at advancing student success as an agenda item is the number of people who we don’t normally talk to on a day-to-day basis who say, “Well, that’s a great idea. Why haven’t you worked on that before?”

And the truth of the matter is everyone in this room has been devoting time, energy, blood and sweat and tears to the topic of student success for a very long time, and we hope that this project is one of the ways that we can remind America of that work that we’re right in the middle of. This is not the start of a student success project. This is grabbing a student success project that has energized our campuses for decades. It’s promoting it, it’s deepening it, it’s making it more effective, and it’s letting the American people know what it’s about.

And then lastly, what excites me about this is that I think that given all of the conversations that we’ve had about institutions doing this and institutions doing that or not doing this or not doing that, today is a day in which we remind ourselves as well as the public that students are at the center of our enterprise. And so in the development of this project, we’ve talked with students, a lot of students, and you’ll get to hear from some more today, and what we’ve fashioned is an action plan not around defining student success, that’s up to all of our campuses, but defining the things that stand in the way of student success, things that research identifies are important, and importantly, things that students say are important to them.

So as we go through the five commitments that we have today, those five commitments represent doorways, gates that we need to open for students so that they can prosper and they can achieve success. In developing those commitments, we’ve had a lot of help, and I mentioned AASCU and APLU and AACC and AAU . . . but 19 college presidents, 19 of your peers got together over a period of about seven months to craft these commitments.

They weren’t done lightly; they weren’t done easily. In fact, we were adding and subtracting some words just a couple of weeks ago, maybe last week, but we think we got what we got and we’re very pleased with it. And I’d like to take a moment to recognize the members of the advisory committee who are here with us today who have done so much heavy lifting to get us to this point, so if you wouldn’t mind standing up, that would be great.

And to go back to my first point about us standing together, the advisory group represented institutions from every segment of American higher education, represented members from different regions, different states, urban and rural, faith based and secular, and so what we have is a coalition headed toward being a movement that is as inclusive as we possibly can make it. And one of the things we’re going to call on you to do after today is over is to help us bring more people into our coalition, so we look forward to that.

So today, we’re going to hear from a couple of panels, and we’re going to talk with some students, as I mentioned, and we’ll have some energy in the middle of the room as we talk about who you are and where you’re from.