2025 RFP

Our 2025 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. This request for proposals (RFP), which builds on our first, represents an additional step toward our 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.

We expect 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. We especially prize innovative, audacious projects that make creative use of novel data sources and study designs to make frame-breaking advances in what we know about the drivers of mobility and how we can measure them.

Download the RFP >

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How to Apply

Explore application instructions, research priorities, and more below.

Application Instructions and Materials

Applying for funding is a two-stage process. Applicants must submit mandatory letters of inquiry by Friday, October 10, 2025, at 5:00 p.m. ET. Those invited to submit full proposals must do so by January 13, 2026, at 5:00 p.m. ET.

Peruse detailed application instructions and materials in the RFP. Applicants may want to preview the LOI form before submitting to ensure all materials and information is prepared, as it does not allow drafts to be saved.

Eligible Applicants

The Student Upward Mobility Initiative awards grants only to US tax-exempt organizations, such as nonprofit or public colleges and universities, school districts, state agencies, and other organizations with a 501(c)(3) determination from the IRS (e.g., research organizations). We do not award grants to individuals.

Key Dates

September 3 and 9: Informational webinars and Q&A sessions

September 19: Last day to request feedback on a one-paragraph project idea

October 10: Mandatory letters of inquiry due at 5:00 p.m. ET

November 13: Finalists invited to submit a full proposal

January 13: Full proposals due at 5:00 p.m. ET

First week of March: Award notifications sent

April/May: Projects begin

Research Priorities

We invite projects across two tracks—developing better measures of likely mobility drivers and identifying and validating mobility drivers.

The Student Upward Mobility Initiative (SUMI) aims to deepen our collective understanding of the skills that matter most for long-term economic mobility and how and when students—especially those growing up in or near poverty—develop them. Within this broader agenda, high school represents a critical, but often underleveraged, inflection point. This RFP focuses on the later years of high school—not because they are the only years that matter but because they offer a strategic vantage point to assess whether earlier skill development has translated into real opportunity and whether system design is reinforcing or disrupting inequities.

Today, students leave high school with vastly different skill sets. As a result and in combination with the dynamic interaction between skills and post–high school opportunities, students face unequal chances of achieving economic security. Yet education policymakers and practitioners lack clarity on what specific skills matter most, when and how they’re best cultivated, and how system-level decisions affect students’ ability to access and build those skills.

SUMI aims to move beyond proxies by identifying skill-based measures that are both meaningful and actionable. These measures can be particularly powerful when conceptualized and analyzed in relation to contextual and structural factors—such as access to high-quality instruction, supportive environments, and cross-system alignment—as seen in tools like the Education-to-Workforce Indicator Framework.

Although the focus of this RFP is on late high school, we welcome proposals that examine how experiences earlier in high school or even in middle school influence skill development and opportunity in later years. We view late high school as a culminating point in a broader trajectory—one that is shaped by cumulative access to opportunity and prior investment in skill building.

This RFP and the work we fund are important steps to ensure SUMI’s work supports broader efforts to ensure that more students, particularly those furthest from mobility, leave high school ready to thrive in the next stage of life. In short, this RFP seeks to generate insights and anchors that will support high school redesign, career-connected learning, and competency-based education efforts and provide them with the information they need to make evidence-based, strategic choices to ensure students leave high school ready to succeed by improving programming, policy, interventions, and investments.

We invite projects that help the education-to-upward-mobility field answer big-picture questions:

• What skills and competencies do high schoolers need to be on track for upward mobility?
• Which skills are necessary for all mobility-boosting next steps out of high school, and which are key for specific next steps in college, career, and the military (e.g., entry into mobility-boosting colleges, into postsecondary training opportunities, and directly into mobility-boosting careers)?
• Which skills develop during middle school and show continued development in high school? What mechanisms drive that improvement, especially for students close to poverty? How do skill development timelines and trajectories vary by student characteristics and why?
• How do course-taking patterns (e.g., tracking, pathways, disenrollment at common attrition points in early high school) factor into all the above?
• How do school structures and access, such as options for advanced coursework, tutoring, and career-connected learning, solidify skill development?

We invite projects that support these areas of inquiry across two tracks: (1) developing better measures of likely mobility drivers and (2) identifying and validating mobility drivers. Hybrid projects are permitted.

Developing Better Measures of Likely Mobility Drivers

In the measure development track, we are especially interested in scalable measures of skills and competencies in key categories that educators, communities, and employers have elevated as particularly important for students’ later economic mobility. We encourage the development or repurposing of measures that are readily available in state or local education agency (SEA or LEA) administrative records, as well as those that could easily be implemented by SEAs or LEAs.

Namely, we request projects that do one or both of the following:

• Develop improved measures of cognitive, social, and emotional skills; social capital; and career preparedness skills and competencies needed in the middle-to-high-school transition, in high school, and beyond, ideally demonstrating how they perform (e.g., content alignment and validity and reliability) compared with existing measures that are not widely used in schools, especially for economically disadvantaged populations, or in terms of implementation burden for schools.
• Use classroom technologies and assessment platforms commonly used in middle or high school or other existing data (e.g., administrative records) as measurement data sources for new or improved constructs.

Identifying and Validating Mobility Drivers

For our second track, we apply a tighter focus on high school and focus on a slightly different subset of potential mobility drivers.

We are looking for projects that do one or both of the following:

• Link high school skills and competencies in the categories of cognitive, social, and emotional skills; social capital; and/or academic achievement subskills to adult mobility outcomes.
• Examine the role and relative weight of contextual and structural factors (e.g., variability in number of options available in rural versus urban schools; school tracking and ability grouping practices) in explaining long-term outcomes in comparison or in addition to individual skills. 

Strong track 2 proposals may also take one or more of the following methodological approaches:

• Link middle school and early high school skills and competencies to late high school and long-term outcomes to examine skill development (including knowledge acquisition) trajectories from middle to high school or some portion of that time.
• Investigate clusters of skills and competencies, especially across the academic and cognitive, social, and emotional categories, to cast light on how they relate to mobility outcomes independently and interactively.
• Use credible experimental, quasi-experimental, or other study designs that help us understand the causal effects of skills and competencies on adult outcomes and the mechanisms of their effects, thereby more credibly validating whether those skills or competencies are mobility drivers or not.

Program or intervention impact evaluations are eligible as long as they align with SUMI’s focus on the skills and competencies that drive upward mobility. These studies may also shed light on whether program or intervention status outcomes are strong proxies for skills and competencies and vice versa.

Projects across both tracks are expected to consider sources of variation and individuals in context, including how outcomes differ by school and environmental characteristics in addition to race, gender, economic background, and any other factors. Strong proposals will explore, conceptually and empirically, why and how much contextual factors matter.

Budget

The Student Upward Mobility Initiative will fund up to $3 million pursuant to this RFP. Teams should request the amount of funding they need to complete their proposed research projects, including direct and indirect costs. Budget size should correspond to the project’s likely impact and proposed activities. Grant periods are flexible up to 24 months.

$50,000 to $150,000: Projects that use existing data, are pilot-testing measures, or are conducting long-term follow-ups of earlier studies with new administrative data

$150,001 to $500,000: Projects that collect original data, involve mixed-methods research, or are connecting large-scale administrative data systems to conduct the research

We accept indirect costs up to 15 percent of the direct costs.

Review the RFP for more details about budgets.

Grantee Expectations

Grantees will enter into agreements with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, the fiscal sponsor for the Student Upward Mobility Initiative, for their funding. As part of that agreement, grantees will be required to do the following:

• agree to or negotiate grant terms, including intellectual property and attribution clauses
• provide banking information through the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors portal
• obtain institutional review board approval from their institution (if required) before beginning work
• adhere to their field’s best practices in research design, methods, and integrity
• publish findings in a working paper or policymaker-oriented publication (regardless of what they show)
• participate in an annual in-person SUMI convening
• grant reporting:
  • 30 to 45 days after grant execution: progress update meeting with SUMI
  • biannually: present work and engage with the grantee community in the biannual virtual community of practice; financial reports
  • biannually: progress update meeting with SUMI
• end of project: work with SUMI to develop communication products that convey your project and its findings to broader audiences; financial report

Application Resources

Below are guidance and resources to strengthen your proposal.

Priority Mobility Drivers

This noncomprehensive list highlights the mobility drivers SUMI is prioritizing in its second RFP. The list was informed by multiple inputs: (1) what educators, communities, and employers say are the skills and competencies that drive long-term success and upward mobility; (2) the subset of those skills and competencies that are generally within the control of PK–12 schools; (3) the gaps in the literature validating those skills and competencies as drivers (inclusive of emerging work from our first cohort of grantees); and (4) the gaps in what we know about how to measure those drivers, particularly informed by the emerging and evolving indicators from the Education-to-Workforce Indicator Framework.

This is a refined and updated perspective on our original Skills, Competencies, and Contextual Factors of Interest.

What We Mean by Economic Mobility

We are interested in understanding how PK–12 skills and competencies relate to long-term success, with a focus on students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Although adults’ wages are the most widely available data to measure economic status and upward mobility, economic mobility is not defined solely by income and wealth. We are interested in a broader conception of mobility.

We are eager to hear about ways these definitions can be operationalized and improved so that, over time, we can agree upon and have data to better understand adult measures of economic success, power and autonomy, and dignity and belonging. We prefer studies that measure mobility in adulthood directly, but we are open to studies that use earlier proxies (e.g., attending or graduating from colleges shown to increase economic mobility) in cases where the potential mobility outcome is especially compelling and a direct link to mobility data is not possible. We also ask grantees to define economic mobility in their proposals. For instance, some of our current cohort use wages at ages 25 and 30, others use growth from parental income, and some use a combination of increases in income and ability to meet basic needs.

Individuals In Context

We outline what we mean by context, environment, structural, and system throughout the RFP and initiative.

Principles and Review Criteria

The Student Upward Mobility Initiative will create a community of grantees whose projects are oriented around these principles. 

Alignment with the Initiative

Research should deepen our understanding of the skills and competencies students develop during PK–12 education that drive economic mobility, especially for students from low-income families, and how to measure those skills. Doing this well will mean considering how structural and other contextual factors affect our core focus on the validation and measurement of skill and competency mobility drivers.

Feasibility and Rigor

All projects will have access to data, a capable team, realistic plans, and clear strategies to address project challenges and must adhere to field best practices and be able to withstand peer review. Letters of support or data agreements are expected at the full proposal stage. Projects that involve development or refinement of measures should apply the highest professional standards for evaluating validity, reliability, and fairness.

Ingenuity

We seek bold, field-advancing projects that ask novel research questions and make use of innovative measures, data, and technology (e.g., artificial intelligence) to advance what we know about the PK–12 skills and competencies that drive mobility.

Actionability

We want research that can be scaled quickly (e.g., by using existing district- or state-collected data), is generalizable to broader contexts, and consensus can be built around. Research-practice partnerships or teams that can partner with districts that have detailed formative assessment data or novel assessments might also be at an advantage.

Field Building

To broaden and strengthen the field of education-to-economic-mobility research, we seek proposals representing different perspectives and experiences (e.g., place, discipline).

Frequently Asked Questions 

We will periodically update this page to include questions we field.

Eligibility and Technical

Who is eligible to apply for funding?

• SUMI awards grants only to US tax-exempt and governmental organizations, such as nonprofit or public colleges and universities, nonprofit research organizations, school districts, state agencies, and other organizations with a 501(c)(3) determination from the IRS. We do not award grants to individuals.

Do my organization and research project have to be based in the United States?

• Yes, all research projects and organizations must be based in the United States or its territories.

Can I submit more than one letter of intent (LOI)?

• Yes, applicants and organizations can submit more than one LOI if they are for distinct projects and research questions. There are no formal limits on the number of awards a researcher or organization can receive. But SUMI is seeking to support innovative work carried out by a range of researchers and organizations.

Is there a preference for internal or external researchers?

• We do not have a preference, but for internal research teams, we want to know how your team plans to maintain objectivity.

Are there requirements for the principal researcher (e.g., level of education)?

• We do not have requirements for the principal researcher. We want every team to explain in the LOI why they are the best fit for the project.

Is there a preference to partner with university researchers on this project?

• There is no preference for team composition. Teams should demonstrate their ability and expertise to conduct the research project, which will necessarily include researchers (though they do not need to be housed within a university) but also may include community-based organizations or school leaders who provide other types of expertise.

What are the expectations for the principal researcher?

• The principal researcher will serve as the primary point of contact throughout the project and will be responsible for ensuring the project is completed with quality and timeliness, managing the budget and proper use of funds, providing substantive updates on the project, and serving as the primary point of contact with SUMI. Teams may indicate additional responsibilities or team structures that support their project in the application.

Is SUMI open to funding research where the students are in a nonprofit rather than a PK–12 school or gaining skills through an out-of-school program?

• Yes, we are agnostic to the PK–12 setting. We want to ensure that any lessons can be contextualized and applicable to other PK–12 school contexts.

Can I submit an application that was previously submitted to or funded by another organization?

• We welcome ideas that align with our initiative and have been reshaped to be competitive. We encourage grantees to note relevant efficiencies within their application.

Can funding be for projects that have only been piloted?

• SUMI does not provide programmatic funding, so it could not be used to expand a program. But SUMI is interested in projects that use innovative data if applicants can articulate a path to scaling and show how results can be useful in other contexts. These data may come from piloted projects, particularly in track 1.

Will data exploration projects be funded?

• All projects must align with the RFP’s goals. Data exploration funding is unlikely, but if teams have an especially compelling dataset they believe might be useful for several research projects in the field, we are eager to hear about that through [email protected].

For data collection, will an online experiment or survey be supported?

• Yes, primary data collection may be appropriate for tracks 1 and 2. It will be important to consider transferability and scalability as well as what other measures are currently available.

Are mixed-methods approaches eligible?

• We invite the appropriate use of an array of qualitative and quantitative approaches.

Application

How can I get feedback on my project idea before applying for funding?

• Applicants who would like a quick reaction to their project idea before applying can complete a brief form with a one-paragraph description here by or before September 19.

What is the process for applying for funding?

• Applying for funding is a two-stage process. Applicants must submit letters of inquiry by Friday, October 10, 2025, at 5:00 p.m. ET. Those invited to submit full proposals must do so by Tuesday, January 13, 2026, at 5:00 p.m. ET.

How will my LOI be evaluated?

• Please read the Values and Application Materials section of the RFP.

What are the document formatting requirements?

• LOIs should be no more than 3 pages single spaced. Full proposals should be no more than 7 pages single spaced if you are applying for a small grant ($50,000 to $150,000) and no more than 11 pages single spaced if you are applying for a large grant ($150,001 to $500,000). See the full RFP for more detailed formatting guidelines.

Do reference lists count toward the three-page limit?

• No, your reference list does not count toward your three pages. You will be prompted to upload your LOI as a Microsoft Word or PDF document, but there is an additional optional question for you to upload any supplemental documents. You can either include your reference list at the end of your LOI or upload it as a supplemental document. Please note that Qualtrics will accept only one file per question, so if you have any other supplemental documents, you will need to make sure they are compiled into one PDF to upload.

Who do I contact if I have technical difficulties or questions about my application?

• Please email questions to [email protected]. A member of our team will respond to your questions as soon as possible. Please leave time when applying to deal with any technical challenges. Late applications will not be accepted.

Are projects expected to go through an institutional review board (IRB)?

• Any projects involving human subjects research must go through IRB approval or demonstrate an exemption from an IRB. But you do not need to demonstrate this in the LOI or proposal stages.

Are institutional letters of support from partners required for the LOI or full proposal?

• These letters are optional in the LOI but are required for the full proposal.

When is the latest a project may start?

• Projects may start immediately after completion of all paperwork (anticipated February or March 2026) but no later than summer 2026.

How does SUMI expect demonstration of findings and impact?

• All requirements for the grant can be found in the RFP. Grantees will be required to produce a peer-reviewed or policy-oriented publication and participate in SUMI convenings. Beyond this mandate, we are especially interested in how applicants can share findings and interim deliverables throughout the project and pathways for impact.

Do applicants need to indicate that they have made agreements with schools (or if they have a recruitment plan) to collect data for the pilot study of the instrument?

• We do not require agreements to be in place for successful applications. But we will require letters of agreement, support, or data-sharing agreements in invited full proposals. We will evaluate the feasibility of your proposal, and evidence of agreements or details about the agreement process and likelihood of partnership will help your application.

Substantive

In states where wage data aren’t easily accessible to researchers, what educational or other employment outcomes would you want to see in a proposal?

• Please see the economic mobility section of our RFP for more details. We ask for measures of mobility, which can include wages and income, measures of autonomy or sense of belonging in community, and job quality. Where none of those are available, we want the applicant to make a strong case that the mobility outcome they propose (e.g., attainment of an in-demand credential, enrollment in a high-mobility college, or financial measures from credit bureaus) is linked to mobility as we’ve conceptualized it. The onus is on the applicant to make a strong case that the proxies they’ve proposed are reasonable stand-ins for direct measures of mobility.

For measure development projects, do applicants need to provide evidence of correlations with economic mobility?

• Applicants can provide justification based on existing research or provide a theoretical justification.

Does a project need to apply to all career paths, or can it be specific to one field (e.g., health care)?

• Applicants are encouraged to think about the skills and competencies driving economic mobility and adult outcomes for all pathways as well as more specific ones.

Is there a geographic preference for projects?

• We do not have geographic preferences. We are interested in a wide range of samples, too, such as having some studies that use school district data, some that use state-level data, and others that use national data. Applicants are encouraged to speak to scalability and the influence of results in their applications.

Could older longitudinal datasets be used?

• We are open to older longitudinal datasets if applicants can demonstrate how the findings are still generalizable and applicable.

Is there a core literature review or seminal references that we should consult about predictors for economic social mobility?

• Please refer to our page on research synthesis.

Can you provide a few examples of skills to be measured?

• Please use the resources from our Skills, Competencies, and Contextual Factors of Interest page or examples provided within the RFP.

Would PK–12 be inclusive of students with disabilities, specifically students with disabilities who stay in public schools up until age 22 and participate in a postsecondary transition training?

• We believe students with disabilities are an important group whose mobility trajectories merit understanding. We are interested in grants that are inclusive of students with disabilities, including students who remain in public schools until age 22 and participate in postsecondary transition training.

How will SUMI think about methodologies that are more community based, emergent, or design based?

• We encourage teams to use methodologies appropriate to the research questions. For teams that use more design-centered methodologies, we strongly encourage a description of how any new measures will be validated.

For track 1, should we also be connecting new measures to mobility outcomes or to predictors of outcomes that could be measured during the study's time frame?

• No, track 1 projects do not need to look at outcomes. These projects are about developing new or improved scalable measures that have a strong theoretical link to economic mobility.

Award Process

Who will be reviewing my application?

• LOIs will be evaluated by Urban’s SUMI team. Full proposals will also be reviewed by the SUMI team and potentially by external peer reviewers.

When can I expect an award decision?

• Applicants who were invited to submit a full proposal should expect to hear back in February 2026.

Who will make the grants?

• Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (RPA), SUMI’s fiscal sponsor, will make all grants. Grantees will enter into grant agreements with RPA.

Who is funding this initiative?

• The initiative’s current funders are the Walton Family Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, and the Overdeck Family Foundation. For more information on our funding, see our About Us page.

What is the allowed period of performance or time horizon for funding?

• Grant periods are flexible up to 24 months.

How does SUMI plan to collaborate with grantees during the 24 months?

• We are excited to create a community of practice among the grantees, wherein research teams will present their work every six months. Additionally, the SUMI team members have regular check-ins (a meeting every six months) and structure ongoing conversations to make end-of-year grant reporting less onerous. Additional details can be found in the Grantee Expectations portion of the RFP.

Budget

Can funding be used to support graduate research assistantships?

• We encourage teams that include graduate assistants to cultivate a pipeline of scholars to contribute to the work.

What is your indirect cost rate policy?

• SUMI accepts indirect costs up to 15 percent of the total budget.

Will proposals be rejected based on the amount requested?

• We will not deny proposals based on budget amounts, as long as they are not over $500,000. We want applicants to apply with the budget request that makes sense to complete the work. Our focus is high-quality research. We will coordinate with applicants who are invited to submit a full proposal to discuss budget adjustments if necessary.

Can the budget be used for stipends for researchers?

• We do not have limitations on stipends if they are connected to project work.

If our research team is internal, would it make more sense to budget for a portion of salaries or itemize activities and apply a cost to the activities?

• We don't have a preference for the LOI and ask only for high-level estimates. Please see the example in the RFP about the level of budget detail we need for the LOI. We will provide a budget template and ask for a longer justification for invited full applicants.

Does the indirect rate cap apply to organizations that have a negotiated indirect cost rate agreement (NICRA)?

• Yes.

Webinars

Wednesday, September 3 | 2:30–3:30 p.m. ET
Watch the recording here. 

Tuesday, September 9 | 3:00–4:00 p.m. ET
Watch the recording here.

If you have questions, email [email protected].

Access the recordings and slides from the 2024 Request for Proposals Informational Webinars.