With a goal of ensuring that all students have the opportunity to receive a high-quality education and increasing low-income students’ college completion rates, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Postsecondary Success team needed to make sense out of a rapidly-growing, and often contradictory, body of research in order to assess its impact and identify areas for future investment. Additionally, the team was in search of guidance on how to convey and update research findings to both internal and external audiences.

Phase Two developed a process to systematically assess the growth and efficacy of the strategies driving the Foundation's work throughout the higher education sector. This included developing clear evidence standards, metrics definitions, and methods for aggregating findings across studies. Using a standardized template and database interface, Phase Two provides Foundation staff with regular updates and visually-intuitive summaries of the latest research relevant to the Foundation's strategy. These summaries are used to guide investment decisions, strategy refreshes, and internal Foundation learning.

The Postsecondary Success team now has access to updated research and research syntheses on a regular cadence, a clear understanding of how to interpret the rigor of research findings, and a process for developing new hypotheses. The use of implementation and evaluation research is more clearly integrated into the team’s work and Phase Two continues to support the integration of data into the team’s rhythm of business. Key funding decisions and strategy shifts were made as a result of this curation and syntehsis process.