A 147-item psychometric instrument that audits institutional systems — budget allocations, staffing authority, governance design, policy architecture, and disaggregated outcome data. Built from peer-reviewed research, validated at national scale, and calibrated against 2,595 IPEDS-reporting institutions.
About the name: The Student Success Capacity Index (SSCI) is Atlas & Crown's applied institutional diagnostic, built on the Equity Infrastructure Index (EII) — a peer-reviewed formative composite developed to measure how institutional systems are structured to produce student success outcomes. The EII is the scholarly instrument; the SSCI is what institutions engage with commercially.
Every institutional leader knows the gap. Completion lags for lower-income students. Retention differentials persist after the first year. Transfer outcomes diverge by income and first-generation status. The data is on dashboards across the country.
What's missing is the mechanism — the specific arrangement of budget authority, staffing depth, governance design, and policy ownership that determines whether the institution is built to close the gap or simply to report it.
The SSCI does not measure intentions. It measures whether the institution's systems are built to produce the outcomes it claims to want.
A score of 67 with a 14-point completion differential and a structural authority sub-score of 32 tells a leader exactly which governance lever to pull first — and what the projected return on that structural investment is at p < .001.
The SSCI is a formative composite: each domain is empirically distinct, federally observable via IPEDS for Layer 1, and audited at internal granularity in Layer 2. Outcomes are the dependent variable, not a weighted input.
| Domain | What is measured | Layer 1 source |
|---|---|---|
| Structural Authority | The reporting line, budget authority, and decision rights of student success leadership. The variable with the largest pre-validation effect size. | IPEDS HR; org. disclosures |
| Financial Architecture | Per-student investment in academic and student support — disaggregated, FTE-corrected, and benchmarked against true Carnegie peer institutions. | IPEDS F1A / F2 |
| Staffing & Caseload | Advising ratios, coaching capacity, and staff representation calibrated against enrollment and Carnegie peer group. | IPEDS HR |
| Policy & Governance | The codified governance architecture for escalation, exception, policy ownership, and remediation. Distinguishes institutions where completion policy has an accountable owner from those where responsibility is ambient. | Public catalog audit |
| Net Price & Access | What the lowest-income quintile actually pays, compared to peer institutions with similar Pell concentrations. | IPEDS SFA |
| Completion & Retention Architecture | Retention, graduation, and completion by Pell status, income quartile, transfer status, and time-to-degree — the outcome column the prior domains predict. | IPEDS GR / Outcomes |
On validation: Layer 1 has pre-validation evidence from national IPEDS data across 2,595 institutions, significant at p < .001 across five completion outcomes. Layer 2 validation — confirmatory factor analysis and MIMIC modeling — is underway with the founding cohort. These are sequential and complementary, not contradictory.
Every IPEDS-reporting institution receives a Layer 1 score from federally mandated public data — no institutional cooperation required, no selection bias. Every prospect benchmarked before the first call.
The full 147-item instrument administered with institutional cooperation. Captures policy and governance variables not visible in IPEDS; delivers the written strategic priorities memo with named levers. Phase 2 CFA underway with founding cohort.
The two-layer architecture is the trust architecture. Layer 1 proves the methodology before the conversation begins. Layer 2 produces the action plan after it. Convergent validity across two independent datasets at two levels of analysis is the moat.
The SSCI is currently in active validation as part of the National Student Success Capacity Study. Founding cohort institutions participate as research partners — not as standard consulting clients.
research participation contribution
Standard post-validation pricing: $5K–$15K
The SSCI is the commercial application of the Equity Infrastructure Index (EII), built from Dr. Staples's published research on institutional investment, unit power, and student success outcomes. The empirical foundation is established at two levels:
Dissertation research (UGA, 2025). Established at the state Multicultural Student Programs & Services unit level that structural authority and per-student investment predict retention for students of color using QuantCrit methodology.
National IPEDS replication (2026). Confirmed the dissertation findings at full national scale with observed census data across 2,595 institutions — five validated outcomes, all significant at p < .001.
Phase 2 validation (underway). Confirmatory factor analysis and MIMIC modeling with founding cohort institutions. McDonald's omega designated for reliability estimation; Cronbach's alpha is explicitly rejected for this formative composite.
Citation: Staples, J. Q. II (2026). Youth. Full methodology paper available on request.
Start with a free Layer 1 baseline lookup. Or apply to the founding cohort for the full institutional audit.