Most Atlas & Crown engagements begin with a thirty-minute strategy call. We'll walk through the institutional decision in front of you — governance redesign, completion systems audit, advisory scope, or a specific diagnostic — and tell you what the right entry point is. No obligation to proceed.
Greensboro
North Carolina · United States
Most inquiries receive a response within one business day.
Submissions are routed directly to Dr. Staples. We do not maintain a third-party CRM for inbound inquiries.
Strategic plans describe destinations. They rarely audit whether the institution's governance structures, data systems, and budget architecture are built to reach them. Most plans are written around goals; the SSCI assesses whether the systems behind those goals are functional. If your institution has a plan and a persistent gap between what the plan says and what the outcomes show, that gap is usually structural — not motivational.
We examine who owns what. Specifically: which institutional roles have named authority over student success policy decisions, what the escalation pathway is when a student falls outside normal procedure, whether completion-relevant policies have an identified owner or exist in a state of ambient responsibility, and whether budget authority for student success functions sits at a level that can actually produce change. Most institutions are surprised to find how many of their completion-relevant policies have no clear owner. That is the governance gap.
EAB Navigate and Civitas Learning are student-level predictive analytics platforms — they identify which individual students are at risk. Noel-Levitz and similar firms measure how students feel about their experience. The SSCI measures neither of those things. It audits whether the institution's governance architecture, investment levels, staffing ratios, and policy infrastructure are structurally capable of converting risk identification into completion. These instruments are complementary — the SSCI tells you what is producing the gap your other data is flagging.
IPEDS gives you outcomes — graduation rates, retention, completion. The SSCI uses that same data plus governance, staffing, and expenditure variables to identify the structural predictors of those outcomes. The question is not "what are your numbers?" — it is "what is producing your numbers, and what would it take to move them?" That requires a validated measurement model applied across 2,595 institutions, not a data pull from your IR office.
Yes, by design. Every Atlas & Crown instrument audits institutional systems — governance structures, budget allocations, staffing ratios, policy ownership, and completion data. None of the instruments audit identity-based programming or require protected-class framing to operate. The methodology produces the same analysis in Florida, Texas, and Tennessee as it does anywhere else. Legal defensibility is a design feature, not a retrofit.
Not to start. Layer 1 scoring is built entirely from federally mandated IPEDS public data — we can produce your baseline score before any institutional cooperation. Layer 2 requires internal access to policy documents, org charts, budget line items, and staffing data, but not student records or anything requiring IRB review.
A Tier 1 Capacity Scorecard is delivered within ten business days of engagement. A full Tier 2 SSCI audit — Layer 1 benchmarking plus Layer 2 internal review, executive briefing, and priorities memo — typically runs six to eight weeks from signed agreement to delivered report. Tier 3 embedded engagements are scoped to the decision cycle, usually three to six months.