How institutions make 3fold gains:
The Three Domains of each Institution’s Constellation

3Fold gains = enabling many kinds of students to achieve at a high level by the time they complete the program (quality with equity; equity with quality), and to do so in a way that’s affordable for the students and other stakeholders.

3fold gains can be attained using a single, mutually supportive set of institutional strengths. Roughly speaking, these strengths fall into three categories: educational strategies, organizational foundations, and wider world interactions. (That’s how all six institutions in the book did it.)

Quick, partial example of a constellation for pursuing specific 3fold gains

Partial list of 3fold goals

  • Quality: develop capabilities and confidence for proactive, responsible citizenship in the state, the employer, the family…

  • Equity: make those quality gains in ways that also improve equitable access to a degree

  • Affordability: speed student time to graduation (increased graduation rates plus accelerated progress to a degree, saving both the student and the institution money and time.

Partial list of constellation elements:

  • Educational Strategies including High-Impact Practices like service learning, civic engagement, capstone projects, and undergraduate research. Almost every student engages in one HIP/year. All students gain; underserved groups develop even more.

  • Organizational foundations including a culture of teaching and a sense of mission to enrich the region; a center for teaching and learning that has helped a significant fraction of the faculty become effective mentors for students in HIPs; faculty P&T (and annual reports) welcome evidence of informed efforts by faculty to improve learning over the years.

  • Wider World Interactions including messaging to potential students, parents, employers, and others explaining these efforts make this education exceptionally valuable for these different groups.

At the bottom of this page is a longer list of the constellation elements used by institutions to make 3fold gains. No institution will use all these strategies simultaneously. Probably every institution is already making some use of several of these. Successful constellation elements can be a first step toward a more effective constellation (elements aligned with and supporting each other) that can foster all three kinds of gains.

Here are a few more examples of constellation elements: educational strategies, organizational foundations, and wider world interactions.

Educational Strategies, Aligning

Research has shown that High-Impact Practices improve learning for many kinds of students while providing a genuine opportunity for seemingly unpromising students to achieve at just as a high level as more promising students by the time they complete their programs. Other HIPs are one tool for advancing quality with access (and vice versa). Less often noticed is the fact that these same outcomes improve affordability in certain ways, too. Students and the institution can save time and money when DFW rates decline, when graduation rates go up, and when students graduate earlier (for example, more students earning a BA in 5 years or even 4.)

There are other educational strategies with the potential to advance 3fold gains, including assignment redesigns incorporating more collaborative and other active forms of learning; guided learning pathways, and Universal Design for Learning (UDL). All these educational strategies should align with the institution’s long-term goals for quality, access, or affordability goals. For example, if one goal is to educate students who as graduates are expert communicators in a variety of media, that ought to be reflected in the details of the institution’s educational strategies.

But it’s difficult to scale up and sustain educational strategies such as these unless the organization changes in ways that also foster 3fold gains.

Organizational Foundations, Aligning

Organizational foundations are internal features that the institution can change, though sometimes only in the long term (e.g., organizational culture). Other examples:

  • institutional culture valuing student learning

  • infrastructure for integrating data from many sources to help the institution understand and influence students’ journeys through the institution;

  • infrastructure for supporting HIPs at scale;

  • centers for teaching and learning that have a crucial role within the institution’s strategies for making 3fold gains;

  • learning spaces (on-campus, off-campus, and online) that make it easier to use many kinds of teaching and learning activities.

Wider World Interactions, Aligning

Academics often underestimate the importance of the wider world (pressures and opportunities originating from outside the institution; transactions of many kinds between inside the institution and outside. Examples:

  • Outside pressures and opportunities: for example, demographics, job markets, the climate crisis, and AI

  • Two-way interactions: for example, how the institution describes itself to attract new students, faculty, and staff; coalitions of institutions helping each other on the journey; accreditation self-studies; improving 2-year - 4-year articulation.