College costs are rising and enrollments are at an all-time high, yet the proportion of students earning degrees has stayed more or less constant for decades. This leads some to conclude that colleges aren't holding up their end of the educational bargain. The question, Do they graduate? is receiving the most scrutiny by state legislatures and by those drafting the reauthorization legislation for the Higher Education Act. A time-honored approach to improving effectiveness is to learn what high-performing organizations within a given industry do and then to determine which of their practices are replicable in other settings. A team of 24 researchers coordinated by the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) Institute for Effective Educational Practice at the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research set out to do just that. The Documenting Effective Educational Practices (DEEP) project was a two-year study of 20 four-year colleges and universities that had both higher-than-predicted graduation rates and higher-than-predicted scores on the NSSE. One of the most important conditions characterizing the DEEP institutions is an intentional focus on institutional improvement. In this article, the authors illustrate what this improvement-oriented ethos looks like in practice and conclude with some ideas for what other institutions can learn from DEEP.