2024 Leah Meyer Austin Award — Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College

Achieving the Dream (ATD), a national organization committed to increasing the success of community college students, today awarded Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College (FDLTCC) the 2024 Leah Meyer Austin Award, its highest recognition given annually to a college in the ATD Network.  

The award signifies a college’s adoption of practices and strategies leading to a student-focused culture, notable increases in student outcomes, and reduction of equity gaps. The announcement was made at ATD’s annual DREAM conference, which brought over 2,000 community college leaders, faculty, and student affairs staff to the Orlando World Center Marriott. 

Originating through the efforts of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa to support the Band’s educational needs, FDLTCC, located in Cloquet, Minnesota, was founded and chartered as a Tribal College by the Band and recognized by the Minnesota Legislature in 1987. After the Reservation Business Committee documented a need for higher educational opportunities among Fond du Lac Band members and the residents of both Carlton and St. Louis counties in Minnesota, the college expanded to include non-Indigenous students. It exists today as the only college in the nation that operates both as a federally recognized Tribal College and as a state community college. 

FDLTCC credits its ongoing reform efforts in the ATD Network with numerous improvements in student success rates that are borne out by data. The college increased its fall-to-fall retention rate from 45% to 53% — despite the fact that the three-year time period over which the increase occurred (2018–2021) included the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The equity gap between students who received Pell grants (federal grants awarded to undergraduates with exceptional financial need) and non-Pell students decreased by 6 percentage points. In addition, Native American students saw improved four-year completion rates in the period of 2020 to 2023 with an 8 percentage-point rise (20% to 28%). 

Most impressive is that Native American students who sought an Associate of Arts (A.A.) degree, which more than two-thirds of all FDLTCC students pursue, saw a dramatic 32-percentage-point increase in their three-year completion rate from 2017 to 2020. In fact, all student groups — Native, Black, white, and first-time-in-college — who were enrolled in the A.A. program made substantive strides in this completion metric.  

“The Leah Meyer Austin Award is meant to recognize deep commitment to equitable student success and whole-college transformation that is inspirational to and emulative for other Network colleges,” said Dr. Karen A. Stout, president and CEO of Achieving the Dream. “At every level of the institution, Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College has demonstrated an unwavering devotion to their students and their student success work, no matter what challenges they encounter. They have also generously shared their knowledge with other Network colleges, particularly other TCUs, which are critical institutions to the preservation of Indigenous cultures, languages, and histories. FDLTCC’s persistence and resiliency — as well as their continuous investment in the success of all TCUs — truly elevates them to the level of a model institution.” 

FDLTCC joined ATD in 2017 among a cohort of Tribal Colleges that entered the Network through Project Success, a U.S. Education Department and Ascendium Education Group-funded initiative to support TCUs in student persistence, retention, and financial management. As a result of the intense commitment to student success demonstrated by its leadership, faculty, and staff, FDLTCC earned Leader College status from ATD in 2021. 

“Receiving the Leah Meyer Austin Award from ATD is an immense honor,” said Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College President Anita Hanson. “As a unique institution, we never forget the mission on which our college was founded by the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and our core values that have guided us to put our students first. I see those same values in the work of all the Tribal Colleges and Universities that are part of the ATD Network, and so, really, this award isn’t so much ours as it is a recognition of the collective hard work in which Tribal Colleges across the country are engaged.” 

The Leah Meyer Austin Award was established in 2008 to recognize outstanding achievement in supporting and promoting student success through the creation of a culture of evidence, continuous improvement, systemic institutional change, broad engagement of stakeholders, and equity, with particular attention to low-income students and students of color. The annual prize is given in honor of Leah Meyer Austin, former senior vice president for program development and organizational learning at the Lumina Foundation and emerita director of the ATD Board of Directors, whose visionary leadership shaped the development of Achieving the Dream. Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College is the 22nd ATD Network College to receive the award. A complete list of past winners can be found here.