The mission of the College Crusade is to promote educational equity and inclusion by increasing high school graduation, college enrollment, and college completion levels among low-income, first-generation, and historically underrepresented students. Its vision is that all Rhode Island students engage in a rigorous educational experience, graduate high school, complete a post-secondary school program and take on meaningful roles in their families, workplace, and communities.

The College Crusade is grounded in public policy partnerships with the RI Office of the Postsecondary Commissioner and the RI Department of Education. The program is implemented through formal partnerships with six school districts in Rhode Island-- Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls, Woonsocket, Cranston and West Warwick. It operates in 37 middle and high schools in these districts, and at the state’s three public colleges. In addition, the organization has a Scholarship Collaborative comprised of 20 colleges and universities, including all colleges in Rhode Island. Last year, the College Crusade awarded $3. 8 million in cash and donated scholarships to over 800 Crusaders. The College Crusade operates at significant scale, serving approximately 4,200 middle school, high school and college students a year, including a new cohort of approximately 400 sixth grade students. There are no academic criteria for entering the program and many students arrive well below grade level in English and mathematics. Once in the College Crusade, students remain members through high school graduation and into college. All of our students are economically disadvantaged, 95% identify as students of color, and approximately 87% will be first-generation college students. The College Crusade's personalized advisory services are at the heart of its work. Crusade advisors are a diverse group of 25 young, full-time college readiness professionals who understand the challenges that young people in disadvantaged communities face. Many are Crusade alumni and several are working in schools they attended as students. Advisors develop trusting relationships with Crusaders by meeting with them individually and in small groups. They also facilitate numerous programs after school and on Saturdays. In addition to advisory services, the College Crusade offers approximately 60 innovative out-of-school programs to meet students’ academic, social and emotional development, career education and college readiness needs. They include tutoring and homework clubs, Saturday Academy math programs, environmental education, robotics and other STEM initiatives, literacy programs, study skills workshops, financial literacy, career exploration, college visits, SAT test preparation, FAFSA and college application support, and many other programs. The College Crusade respects and values the critical role that families play in their children’s education. Its family engagement services reach over 1,400 family members a year through one-on-one meetings, parent council meetings, family forums, and dozens of workshops that focus on social-emotional development, financial literacy, and parents’ capacity to advocate for their child’s educational success.

The College Crusade is a national leader in the college access field. From 2015-2017, the organization won three major awards from the National College Access Network (NCAN). In 2018, Excelencia in Education, a national organization working to close the achievement gap for Latinos, honored the College Crusade with its prestigious Examples of Excelencia Award. In 2019, the organization will be awarded the Rhode Island Foundation’s 2019 Community Leadership Award, the foundation’s highest honor for a non-profit organization. In recognizing the College Crusade, these organizations have generally cited the comprehensive nature of its programs combined with its capacity to provide compelling evidence of longitudinal impact.

Data collection and analysis is managed by an evaluation and research specialist. Student and parent assessments are administered annually, while individual program surveys are administered at the start and/or end of each program. The College Crusade collects course enrollment and grade data from school districts and receive state testing scores, socioeconomic status, advanced course taking, and graduation data from RIDE. College enrollment, persistence and degree attainment data are collected from the National Student Clearinghouse. The College Crusade's three main goals are to increase high school graduation, immediate college-enrollment, and college-persistence rates for its students. Additional outcomes tracked by the College Crusade are increasing rigorous course taking, increasing early college coursework, reducing remediation, and increasing family engagement, among others. The College Crusade's long-term impact is measured by independent evaluators at the Center for Labor Markets and Policy at Drexel University. Drexel’s longitudinal study matches College Crusade participants with a comparison group along a wide variety of academic, demographic and behavioral indicators. They use propensity score matching methods to establish the comparison group, which are regarded as the best methods to minimize bias when a random control trial is not possible. This longitudinal study is funded through 2024, with a new cohort being added each year. Drexel’s most recent findings indicate that, from the point of entry in sixth grade, Crusaders are 11% more likely to graduate high school on time, 30% more likely to enroll in college, and 39% more likely to persist to a second year of college than students in a rigorously matched comparison group.

The College Crusade has achieved dramatic growth in high school graduation, college enrollment and college persistence rates in recent years. As the organization has expanded its postsecondary program, it hopes to continue on that trajectory to focus more on college completion. There are many factors that contribute to a student's college persistence, so the College Crusade has started strategizing around how to best address those barriers to completion, which can be anything from an emergency expense, to being undermatched to a university, to having a lack of information about the transfer process, or course selection.