Ali Caccavella has made it her life’s work to promote education, working tirelessly to ensure education availability for everyone.

This week, Caccavella, who serves as Special Advisor and Liaison to the Office of Postsecondary and Higher Education and the State Board of Higher Education at the Pennsylvania Department of Education, will speak to a group of Temple graduates who know full well what it means to take educational opportunities by both hands to reach an essential milestone.

Caccavella will be the 2026 Keynote Speaker at the University College Graduation Ceremony on May 7 when the fifth cohort of Bachelor of General Studies students reach the end of a journey that, for some, was years and even decades in the making.

“It’s a tremendous honor to be asked to address this group. Our time and attention are our most precious resources,” she said. “To be asked to speak to these graduates who worked so hard to reach this benchmark, which too few across our state and our country have managed to achieve, is quite an honor.”

During her talk, Caccavella said, she wants to emphasize “that what they have accomplished is a remarkable achievement and that it really matters, more than ever, across our generational, economic and workforce landscape.”

“Higher education is increasingly needed across the job market. Every predictor, every labor market analysis, every economist and employer of industry is telling us that we need more post-secondary credentials, including bachelor’s degrees. We know that our bachelor’s degree attainment is not where we want it to be,” she said. “The individuals who are graduating from Temple’s Bachelor of General Studies program had to show persistence, demonstrate their commitment and overcome any number of obstacles to reach this place. The human skills that they have excelled at — advocacy, problem-solving, interpersonal skills — they are incredibly valuable, now more than ever in the age of AI.”    

Caccavella is an education leader with more than 25 years of experience dedicated to expanding economic opportunities through post-secondary education and training. She began her career in Pennsylvania classrooms and has since partnered with K-12 schools, community organizations, businesses, government agencies and higher education institutions nationwide, always guided by the experience of students and practitioners closest to the work.

“As a young person, I was a curious and eager student. I was fascinated by my teachers and this role they serve imparting education. As I grew older, I began to realize that education is the most life-changing privilege that we can experience,” she said. “Education should be a basic human right, but we know that it’s increasingly difficult to achieve, particularly as resources are constrained. The core functions of education are being attacked precisely because it is so powerful.”

It is a “defining quality of humans that we’re able to be self-reflective,” Caccavella said.

“We have the ability to attend to learning beyond our immediate survival, to pursue our curiosity,” she said. “Everyone in the world should have the ability to do so beyond just surviving. We grow intellectually and emotionally in our education and improve our capacity to make meaningful contributions to society during this precious time we have on Earth.”

Today, Caccavella’s focus is simple: Make higher education more affordable, accessible and worth it for learners of every background and starting point. She has deep expertise in postsecondary advising, financial aid, student wellbeing, governance and data systems, grounded in years of direct service, research and advocacy for evidence-based reform.

“I started out as a classroom teacher, mostly in the Philadelphia area, before moving toward school management and instructional support. I was working to supervise teachers and instructional programs centered around social-emotional learning,” she said. “I moved from classrooms into nonprofit program development, working with schools and higher education institutions to drive increased opportunity to post-secondary pathways. I ended up doing national and federal training, particularly around financial aid, which is a core lever for access — having been in schools and supporting students and families, I recognized that some of the biggest obstacles were around navigating affordability policies and financial aid.”

As Special Advisor and Liaison to the Office of Postsecondary and Higher Education and the State Board of Higher Education, Caccavella has helped shape and implement Pennsylvania’s historic higher education reforms under Governor Josh Shapiro, including the Commonwealth's first-ever postsecondary coordinating entity, a performance-based funding formula and a student-level data system.

She leads coordination across the board, the department and partner agencies to advance initiatives like public benefits access and Workforce Pell, with the goal of making higher education “more accessible, attainable and valuable across Pennsylvania and the nation.”

“I’m delighted to take that learning and expertise from our students, families and colleagues to advance system and policy change. Systemic change must take place at the root level,” she said. “As practitioners working in a system that’s broken, we’re constantly putting a Band-aid as the bridge to support the student sitting in front of us. The ability to work at the structural level allows us to make it streamlined for everybody and make those bridges permanent, not a one-off repair.”

Caccavella said she found her passion in “system change work — permanently removing the obstacles to our students and families accessing and completing post-secondary college credentials.”

“In Pennsylvania, we established the State Board of Higher Education, still less than two years old, to advance a first-of-its-kind strategic plan for higher education in the state,” she said. “It’s allowing us to meaningfully use data and evidence to inform our policy and meet state goals for post-secondary learners, which we know are very much anchored toward driving economic mobility not only for our families and communities, but for our industries across the Commonwealth.”

For the May 7 talk to the graduates of the Bachelor of General Studies program, Caccavella said she wants to provide an “enduring reminder of how ‘badass’ all of the working, persisting and overcoming they’ve done to get to this point really is!”

“I hope it seeds a level of confidence that continues to grow as they are out there experiencing the world from a new lens — that their confidence grows the more they put those skills into practice. I hope they have the realization that learning is a lifelong process,” she said. “They have demonstrated in their completion of this degree critical thinking and a level of human problem solving and navigation that is only becoming more necessary and more essential in our lifetime.”

The Bachelor of General Studies is designed for learners with prior college and at least sixty transferable credits who are ready to complete their undergraduate degree. The 120-credit bachelor’s program focuses on creating a solid foundation for a wide variety of careers and it allows students the opportunity to customize their degree path. Learn more about the Bachelor of General Studies here.