University President Peter Salovey and Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Jeremiah Quinlan joined administrators from 55 universities across the nation to discuss methods for increasing low-income student enrollment last week.

Salovey and Quinlan traveled to New York City on Feb. 22 for the day-long conference organized by the American Talent Initiative — a coalition of universities that aims to increase the number of low-income students enrolled in top universities by 50,000 by 2025. Salovey attended the President’s Roundtable, and Quinlan presented Yale’s “collective impact framework,” a document which outlines the University’s approach to the ATI’s goals, during a panel discussion. ATI Project Co-lead Tania LaViolet said the President’s Roundtable brought together university presidents representing a diverse cross-section of four-year colleges and universities.

“These conversations provided strategic direction to the support and activities [the ATI co-managing institutions] the Aspen Institute and Ithaka S+R will pursue in the next year and beyond, including designing a cross-institutional practice-sharing community, developing a shared research agenda and developing a communication strategy to amplify the impact of members’ individual and collective actions,” LaViolet said in an email.

During the roundtable, presidents of ATI member schools exchanged ideas on applying individual institutions’ best practices toward a collective effort, LaViolet said.

Quinlan said the ATI meeting was a “good start” but noted that he was looking forward to turning individual efforts into systematic, inter-college partnerships with a broader impact. As part of the ATI, member institutions will share institutional data in order to bolster enrollment of students from low-income backgrounds and will publish a report each year on the schools’ progress.

While Quinlan said specific details contained in the “collective impact framework” document are confidential, the document reaffirms Yale’s commitment to increasing the number of first generation and low-income students at Yale.

Quinlan also noted that the University was in a unique position to affirm its dedication to these communities, due to the increased class sizes created by the new residential colleges.

“We were already planning on doing these things, but the ATI has given us the chance to share the best practices of our institution,” Quinlan said. “It allows us to try to explore partnerships and initiatives that involve a broad set of institutions to have a big impact.”

One initiative the University recently announced is a formal partnership with Matriculate, a national nonprofit that provides college counseling services to students from underresourced high schools.

The ATI’s goals are similar to the accessibility goals put forward during the 2014 White House Summit, at which the University made a number of pledges aimed at increasing the preparedness of incoming students and fostering a more diverse socioeconomic community.

After the roundtable, Salovey said an emphasis on need-based financial aid across all ATI member institutions would be critical to reaching the collective’s goals, according to a Feb. 24 release in YaleNews.

The ATI was founded in December.

LUKE CIANCARELLI