UCI grant to research pathway to a bachelor’s degree for formerly incarcerated students

The UCI Office of Inclusive Excellence awarded funding to a group of faculty, including UCI School of Education Assistant Professor Brandy Gatlin-Nash (right), for a project designed to provide a pathway for incarcerated students to obtain a UC bachelor’s degree.
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Through the project, LIFTED: Leveraging Inspiring Futures Through Educational Degrees, investigators will work with graduate students to collect and analyze data on existing modalities of instruction within prisons (pre- and post-COVID) and conduct literature reviews and interviews to identify factors that influence success for formerly and currently incarcerated students. 

​“An immediate goal of the project is to identify and understand existing course delivery models in prisons,” Gatlin-Nash said.

One of the long-term goals of the project is to build a replicable and scalable model, identifying the factors, including non-cognitive factors, that shape the success of this diverse population of students in higher education. LIFTED will, therefore, be both a support network and an engine of discovery, uncovering components of student success that will be key to building impactful programs for students in prisons and in classrooms on campus.

“We have designed the program specifically with sustainability and replicability in mind: to demonstrate a viable model that can be replicated across other UC campuses, effectively signaling a state-wide approach for California and the nation,” Gatlin-Nash said.

LIFTED will also collaborate with the UCI student group, The Underground Scholars Initiative, which serves formerly incarcerated and system-impacted students. The organization works to create a prison-to-school pipeline through recruitment, retention, and advocacy and directly challenges stigmas associated with the students.

Additional researchers on the project include:

• Pavan Kadandale (lead researcher), assistant professor of teaching, Molecular Biology & Biochemistry, UCI School of Biological Sciences
• Valerie Jenness, acting vice provost, Academic Planning and Institutional Research; distinguished professor, Criminology, Law & Society, UCI School of Social Ecology
• Keramet Reiter, associate professor, Criminology, Law & Society, UCI School of Social Ecology
• Carroll Seron, professor emerita, Criminology, Law & Society, UCI School of Social Ecology

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LIFTED is one of 19 projects to be funded by UCI’s Advancing Equity in the Age of COVID-19 initiative. The initiative supports research that uses COVID-19 as a lens through which to explore “the uneven effects and realities of the pandemic on people, communities, societies, nation-states, state systems or global or planetary conditions.”