The Student Upward Mobility Initiative grant program seeks studies that identify and measure the skills and competencies in late high school (grades 11–12) that propel students into economic mobility and the ways in which skill development and access to opportunity in early high school and middle school shape those trajectories.
Donor Name: Urban Institute
State: All States
County: All Counties
Territory: American Samoa, Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, Guam, U.S Virgin Islands
Type of Grant: Grant
Deadline: 10/10/2025
Size of the Grant: $100,000 to $500,000
Grant Duration: 2 Years
Details:
SUMI works to support students’ economic mobility by identifying the PK–12 skills and competencies across the categories of academic achievement; cognitive, social, and emotional skills; health and well-being; social capital; and career preparation that drive long-term success, especially for those from backgrounds of economic disadvantage. This request for proposals (RFP), which builds on the first, represents an additional step toward the long-term vision of equipping education policymakers and practitioners with a short list of key mobility drivers and measures of them around which to design systems and structures and better understand the role of short- and long-term benefits of earlier skill development
Two Proposal Tracks
- Track 1: Developing Better Measures of Likely Mobility Drivers
- Track 2: Identifying and Validating Mobility Drivers.
Funding Information
Student Upward Mobility Initiative expected to award $3 million in grants up to 24 months in length, ranging from $50,000 to $500,000, with most projects falling below $350,000.
- Small grants, $50,000 to $150,000: Projects that use existing data with minimal novel or high-cost cross-system matching and linkages, are pilot-testing measures, or are conducting long-term followups of earlier studies with new administrative data.
- Large grants, $150,001 to $500,000: Projects that collect original data, are newly linking administrative data across domains, or paying for costly previously matched data or computing costs.
Eligibility Criteria
Teams should be led by principal investigators with experience conducting research and an affiliation with an eligible nonprofit organization, such as an academic institution, public entity, or state or local government agency. All organizations must be based in the United States or its territories. They do not award grants to individuals.
For more information, visit Urban Institute.
