Urban Institute

A national nonprofit research organization studying economic and social policy. Cited in the MMI brief for its Student Upward Mobility Initiative (SUMI), which funds research to develop and validate measures of the skills that drive economic mobility — a direct contribution to the H3 measurement R&D pipeline.

Student Upward Mobility Initiative (SUMI)

The MMI brief's one-line characterization: SUMI is "funding research to develop and validate measures of skills that drive economic mobility." That positions it as a funder of new-measure development rather than a publisher of frameworks — an important distinction in the field.

Three things make SUMI consequential for the KB:

  1. It targets a specific construct gap. Skills that drive economic mobility are an under-measured intersection of human-skills work (an Individual-level concern, in the five-level framework) and longer-run outcomes (extending toward the Ecosystem level via labor markets).
  2. It's a funder, not just a research org. SUMI is one of the funding vehicles seeding the new-assessment R&D pipeline — comparable in function to the Learning Engineering Tools Competition but with a narrower construct focus.
  3. It puts the Urban Institute inside the H3 measurement conversation. The broader Urban Institute has not historically positioned itself as a learning-measurement actor; SUMI is the bridge.

Follow-ups

  • Ingest SUMI directly — its program page, any published RFPs, and the list of funded research projects. The funded-project list is a discovery surface for new individual-level measurement work.
  • Track which orgs have received SUMI funding — they'd be candidate entity pages.
  • Clarify whether SUMI is funded by Urban Institute itself or is a hosted initiative with external funders (the brief doesn't specify).