Resource Library

The Community College Research Center produced this workshop curriculum and support material for colleges that have not been well served by existing technical assistance providers in the guided pathways reform movement. Funded by Ascendium’s Guided Pathways What and How To Educational Series grant, the suite of materials includes a facilitator’s guide and a customizable presentation, one-page overview, samples and activities.

New America is creating the first national database on Community College Baccalaureate (CCB) programs. Partially funded by Ascendium, this database will help policymakers and institutional leaders better understand CCBs. This brief provides data visualization to offer a first step towards documenting the types of degrees, program areas and geographic concentration of CCB programs.

The Strong Start to Finish (SSTF) Knowledge Center is a clearinghouse of research and resources from those in the SSTF network, intended for all institutions and systems interested in implementing developmental education reforms. Resources can be searched by keyword, sorted by format and filtered by topic. SSTF is supported by Ascendium, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and The Kresge Foundation.

This report by the Association of American Colleges and Universities features narratives, best practices and recommendations from a two-year project to strengthen guided pathways implementation at 20 participating campuses. In this effort, funded in part by Ascendium, participants mapped academic paths and degree programs to student goals, helped students choose and stay on a degree path and built capacity to ensure students were learning.

This Ascendium-supported report outlines how the Community College Research Center's thinking has evolved in the six years since it published Redesigning America’s Community Colleges, an influential book on guided pathways. Since that time, the center has studied the adoption, implementation costs and effects of guided pathways at more than 100 institutions. The report offers high-level recommendations, including increased use of experience-based learning, early advising tied to academic majors and customized onboarding paths for older adults returning to school.

The National Association of College and University Business Officers produced these flexible, user-friendly videos and activities to help all campus employees understand how they can help students overcome systemic barriers and succeed. The six-part curriculum, supported by Ascendium, includes modules on overcoming implicit bias, understanding and overcoming systemic racism and more.

Ascendium supported the Institute for Evidence-Based Change to produce a series of guides on Caring Campus, a holistic approach to improving a sense of student belonging and connection on campus with the goal of increasing student success. This third guide details ways professional staff and others can incorporate concepts of racial equity, specifically the behavioral commitments, into the Caring Campus approach.

This toolkit supports college faculty, administrators and advisors in ensuring that corequisite mathematics classes provide the support students need to be successful, particularly those who are students of color, first-generation and from low-income communities. It also provides nationally agreed-upon design principles for math corequisites, as well as tools and resources to make them actionable. It’s part of the Strong Start to Finish initiative led by Education Commission of the States and supported by Ascendium, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and The Kresge Foundation.

This Strong Start to Finish (SSTF) toolkit aims to build capacity for large-scale, equity-grounded, student-focused change by providing tested change leadership strategies for mid-level campus managers. SSTF is led by Education Commission of the States and supported by Ascendium, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and The Kresge Foundation.

This report, supported by Ascendium, examines innovative ways Ohio community colleges are providing personalized student supports within the guided pathways model. The report finds that personalizing universal supports has the potential to increase equity by better recognizing and meeting the needs of underrepresented students, a step towards reducing structural barriers to their success.

The University Innovation Alliance produced a comprehensive suite of materials to provide qualitative analysis for the completion grants strategy and a roadmap for institutions considering starting their own programs. With support from Ascendium and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, it draws on the experiences of 11 member institutions using completion grants to increase graduation rates for low-income learners.

The Community College Research Center at Columbia University Teachers College prepared this primer and federal policy brief on Guided Pathways, a comprehensive reform approach whereby community colleges fundamentally reshape themselves in ways that create clearer pathways to credentials with strong labor-market value. The brief draws heavily on research funded by Ascendium in the past several years.