The National Education Opportunity Network (NEON) is a national education justice nonprofit committed to propelling access and opportunity for higher-achieving high school students in historically marginalized communities. It works with a consortium of selective colleges to deliver, and support, college credit-bearing courses into teacher-led Title 1 high school classrooms, at scale – and at no cost to students. As of spring 2026, NEON has offered courses in nearly 600 schools nationwide across 32 states and over 200 cities, reaching approximately 60,000 students.
The National Education Opportunity Network program is founded on the idea that while talent is evenly distributed, opportunity is not. Many higher-achieving students from economically disadvantaged or minority backgrounds are unable to pursue the postsecondary opportunities that are open to similarly skilled students from more advantaged backgrounds and are thus blocked from career paths and lifelong opportunities that would be available to them under more equal or merit-based conditions.
As a relatively new program, evidence of the program’s effectiveness is needed to better understand what type of students are being served by the program, and if the program is elevating their postsecondary outcomes. Evidence of the program’s impact would support its scaling to more states, districts, schools, and students as a cost-effective model for improving the postsecondary outcomes, and therefore the career and lifelong opportunities, of historically marginalized communities.
The purpose of the study was to gather exploratory evidence regarding the program’s participating student population and their backgrounds, as well as their postsecondary outcomes using data from the Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS). Given that the NEON program has a concentration of participating schools (24) in M-DCPS, analysis of their student longitudinal data will provide an exploratory estimate of the program’s impact as well as information regarding the student population served by the program.
