Academy for College Excellence (ACE)

The Academy for College Excellence (ACE), formerly the Digital Bridge Academy, was developed at Cabrillo College with support from the James Irvine Foundation, the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. ACE provides a new model for serving under-prepared (demographically, many are from low-income or minority groups) students that has shown success with a group of students considered unlikely to succeed in college. It is a curriculum-based persistence model, designed to help students develop a sense of self-efficacy and potential, and motivate them to engage in learning once again and claim a future they couldn't see before. These students are then accelerated to college level performance on several dimensions in an intensive, integrated 16 units semester-long program.