Meet the 2024 Awardees
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Fellow
Fellow
Fellow
Project Development Grantee
AVDF/ACLS Fellowships for Research on the Liberal Arts
In 2023, the American Council of Learned Societies launched the AVDF/ACLS Fellowships for Research on the Liberal Arts, made possible by a generous grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. This highly competitive, peer-reviewed program provides funding and data training for scholarly projects that draw upon the newly available College and Beyond II (CBII) database. The program is not accepting applications.
The impact of a liberal arts undergraduate curriculum has long been difficult to measure and assess. Lacking data that record the skill attainment, civic involvement, or well-being of students after they leave college, many institutions struggle to examine the impact of a liberal arts education on diverse learners at different stages and aspects of their lives and careers. The CBII database—created by a team of scholars and staff at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan with support from the Mellon Foundation—includes more than one million student records, 50 million course enrollments, and alumni surveys for 2,800 respondents.
The first CBII data sets were released in 2022. At that time Paul Courant, the original primary investigator of the CBII project and former provost at the University of Michigan, noted that CBII “will allow us to explore the connection between undergraduate education and student outcomes ten years after college completion. These outcomes include important behaviors and mindsets such as democratic and civic engagement, openness to diversity, psychological well-being, and career adaptability.”
The AVDF/ACLS Fellows for Research on the Liberal Arts will each receive $45,000 toward their projects, participate in a two-day data training led by the research team at ICPSR, and convene for a subsequent symposium to share their findings with one another and invited journalists.
The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations were organized in 1952 and are supported by two trusts established by Mr. Arthur Vining Davis. The Foundations aim to bear witness to Mr. Davis’ successful corporate leadership and his ambitious philanthropic vision. Since their inception, the Foundations have given over 3,800 grants totaling more than $300 million to colleges and universities, hospitals, medical schools, and divinity schools.