Strategic Initiatives

Section 215 of the Massachusetts Fiscal Year 2025 budget created a Commission on Higher Education Quality and Affordability. The 21-member group of higher education, business, civil rights, and other stakeholders is charged with reviewing, evaluating, and making recommendations.

The Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Toolkit ("The Toolkit") is a comprehensive website that provides resources to all institutions in the Commonwealth as a part of the Department of Higher Education's (DHE) goals and Equity Agenda to "dismantle barriers to success and work toward ensuring a just educational experience within which students thrive". Institutions vary in their progress to date in addressing racial equity issues; the Toolkit is meant to support all institutions as they continue the work to achieve racial equity.

The DHE will develop a statewide strategic plan focused on equity, to be reflected in our policies, programs, and initiatives. The expectation is that, by doing so, the Massachusetts system of public higher education will enhance economic and social mobility for all citizens, but particularly for those that have historically been underserved and underrepresented, especially students of color, throughout all levels of education.

The purpose of the Early College Initiative is create and maintain partnerships connecting our state's districts and high schools with our state's colleges. in order to give thousands of Massachusetts students, especially first-generation college-goers, access to college completion and career success.

The DHE is responsible for implementing the 2021 Campus Sexual Assault Law, and issuing necessary regulations, policies and technical guidance that will help support and advance campus safety and violence prevention (CSVP) initiatives at public and private institutions of higher education (IHEs) in Massachusetts.

DHE, collaborating with the Executive Office of Education and the Commonwealth’s public colleges and universities, is engaged in a wide-ranging effort to modernize data and analytics systems, improve analytic capabilities, and place data at the center of all policy discussions in public higher education.

The Open Educational Resources (OER) initiative grew out of recommendations from the Commissioner’s OER Work Group and aims to expand OER use on campuses and provide advice and counsel to the DHE for statewide implementation.

Resulting from their Strategic Review Public of Higher Education Finance, the BHE has proposed a Framework for Strategic Public Higher Education Financing that seeks to modernize and strengthen the Commonwealth’s higher education financial planning process to ensure an equitable, affordable, and sustainable Massachusetts public higher education system for the long term.

AMCOA advances assessment of student learning on public campuses amd strengthens campus assessment capabilities.

Bridges to College supports adult college transition services that increase the number of low-income, underrepresented, entry-level adult workers who enter and succeed in postsecondary education.

Massachusetts is the first state in the nation to make Civic Learning a goal for all undergraduates in public higher education and the first state in the nation to establish a shared goal of Civic Learning for K-12 and public higher education.

CDEP provides opportunities for Massachusetts high school students to take college-level courses for free or at a discounted price and earn credit toward high school completion and their future college degrees.

From 2012 to 2015, the Department of Higher Education developed industry-specific workforce plans to support and coordinate economic and workforce development initiatives across Massachusetts' 29 public college and university campuses and align training, certificate, and degree programs with the workforce needs of the Commonwealth's growth and emerging industry sectors.

The Massachusetts Board of Higher Education (BHE) is required by statute and regulation to annually assess the financial information of private institutions of higher education for the purpose of identifying and monitoring institutions at risk of imminent closure, and mitigating the impacts of closures on students, their families, faculty, staff, and the community.

Part of a national initiative to encourage more young people to have high expectations, stay in school, study hard and take the right courses to go to college, GEAR UP Massachusetts serves low-income priority students in five cohorts across seven of the Commonwealth’s most impoverished areas.

Formerly known as PIF, the Innovation Fund supports competitve grants to campuses and consortia, as well as certain systemwide initiatives, to make progress on goals articulated by the BHE.

The DHE administered funding from the Title II: Part A of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 for several professional development partnerships through the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) Improving Teacher Quality State Grant Program.

MAICEI offers grants to college-school partnerships to support eligible public high school students with intellectual disabilities, ages 18–22, to increase their academic and career success by being included in a college or university community of learners.

MassTeach is a program designed to recruit and support more STEM teachers who start their college careers at a community college.

These learning outcomes for fundational courses ensure that students develop the same knowledge and skills that will be required when they transfer to or continue to matriculate within a four year institution.

MassTransfer is a collaboration between the Commonwealth's community colleges, state universities and the University of Massachusetts. MassTransfer policies seek to recognize the time and effort of students by ensuring their credits transfer between public institutions.

PACE is a collaborative initiative of Massachusetts’ nine state universities and 15 community colleges designed to promote cost savings and operational efficiencies, increase productivity and improve service delivery.

STEM Starter Academy has been supporting community college STEM students earn degrees and certificates since 2014. The Department of Higher Education wants to continue to support community college students in their education as they pursue bachelor’s degrees at one of our public 4-year institutions.

Under the guidance of the Massachusetts STEM Advisory Council, the STEM Nexus portal is devoted to directing users to information about STEM educational and workforce programs, policies, and resources, all in an effort to strengthen the pipeline of STEM-skilled residents.

The goal of SSA is to recruit, ready, retain and graduate a diverse body of community college students earning STEM certificates and degrees and transferring to 4-year STEM programs or entering the workforce. The UMass Donahue Institute (UMDI) serves as the external evaluator to determine SSA impacts and student outcomes.

Research shows that many students in Massachusetts experience hunger and/or homelessness. In 2019, twelve public campuses joined innovative, state-funded pilot programs to address housing insecurity. Most individual campuses operate food pantries and offer non-academic support services to meet student needs.

Massachusetts is part of a national effort to develop student learning assessment tools that capture the complexity of college learning better than a single standardized test, and allows for comparisons between public campuses in the state and similiar institutions in other states.

The Task Force on Statewide Assessment provides broad oversight for statewide assessment in Massachusetts.

The DHE and public higher ed system are working together to transform developmental education and have adopted a three-pronged approach to reduce remediate and increase student success: (1) Implementation of mathematics pathways; (2) Support through the co-requisite model; (3) Use of multiple measures.

The Training Resources and Internship Network (TRAIN) grant program is designed to support long-term unemployed, under-employed and new entrant adult workers who seek to enter/reenter the workforce and address this workforce shortage.

A steering committee represents Massachusetts in the Multi-State Collaborative, a consortium within the VALUE Institute, to develop multi-state program of assessment.