Request for Proposals and Webinar: Student Upward Mobility Initiative 2025 – Sep 9

Posted by Urban Institute on September 9, 2025

The Student Upward Mobility Initiative works to support students’ economic mobility by identifying the PK–12 skills and competencies that drive long-term success, especially for students from backgrounds of economic disadvantage. We launched our second request for proposals (RFP) in August 2025, which represents an additional step toward our long-term vision of equipping education policymakers and practitioners with a short list of key mobility drivers around which to design systems and structures.

An informational webinar for interested applicants will be held on September 9, 3:00-4:00 PM. Learn more and register for the webinar here.

Through this new RFP, we seek studies that identify the skills and competencies in late high school that propel students into economic mobility and the ways skill development and access to opportunity in early high school and middle school shape those trajectories. We prize innovative, audacious projects that make creative use of novel data sources and study designs to make groundbreaking advances in what we know about the drivers of mobility and how we can measure them. 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. We expect to award $3 million in grants ranging from $50,000 to $500,000 for projects lasting up to 24 months. We will share the same overview content across two dates and times to increase access and convenience.