Supporting Success: Building Evidence on Community College Reforms

One cohesive framework for delivering a different, better-supported experience to community college students is guided pathways. Guided pathways is based on the powerful idea of backwards design. The ultimate end goal — the timely completion of credentials valued in the local labor market — guides the redesign of institutional structures, policies, and practices at each step of the student journey. This journey starts with effective onboarding to a coherent educational path in the first year and ends with a living-wage, career-path job, or seamless transfer with no excess credits.

While evidence is mounting about this framework’s promise for improving student outcomes at scale, additional evidence building is needed to support continued implementation, evolution, and sustainability. Ascendium grantees have and will continue to generate the knowledge and insights about guided pathways needed by institutional leaders and policymakers to transform community colleges into true engines of upward mobility.

Guided Pathways: The First Ten Years (2015-2025)

Guided pathways became an important part of a broader community college reform movement in 2015, following the publication of the Community College Research Center’s (CCRC’s) seminal book, Redesigning America’s Community Colleges. Alongside other postsecondary education funders, Ascendium has supported colleges to implement guided pathways, as well as efforts to systematically learn about that implementation and its impact on student outcomes.

Recently, CCRC published a new Ascendium-supported book highlighting 10 years of research on how colleges have implemented guided pathways and how it may improve student outcomes. To date, about 400 community colleges — out of just over 1,000 nationally — have adopted the framework. Recent studies, foremost two large-scale evaluations, have provided evidence that scaled adoption of guided pathways is associated with positive learner outcomes.

These studies also suggest that the impacts of guided pathways vary by implementation intensity and approach. Colleges with complementary sets of reforms at scale — such as new onboarding and advising approaches — experienced the largest benefits. And yet, even among colleges that undertook reforms in those two areas, those that did not reform developmental education saw no improvements in early student success metrics, underscoring the importance of this particular reform for broader guided pathways success.

These findings build on other studies that examine the effects of specific guided pathways-associated reforms on students’ persistence, completion, and labor market success. Here are a few key takeaways.

• Reforming developmental education is fundamental to greater student success. Research has proven that a suite of reforms, including co-requisite models, is more effective than using a high-stakes examination to route students into a long sequence of remedial, pre-collegiate courses.
• Case management advising shows great promise for increasing college persistence, degree completion, and earnings post-graduation. However, it’s difficult and costly to implement, and at least one study in the four-year context has yielded more mixed results.
• Aligning college programs to quality, in-demand jobs in local economies is an emerging practice with a strong logic. Early evidence that this alignment can move the needle on learner outcomes is promising.  

The Next Frontier: Continued Evidence-Building on Guided Pathways

As Ascendium continues to invest in colleges to implement guided pathways, we will also continue to build evidence about it, both as a whole-college transformation and as a collection of more discrete reforms.

Because guided pathways requires significant and sustained investments from colleges, Ascendium sees a need for additional evaluations documenting the outcomes associated with scaled and sustained implementation of the full guided pathways framework. This evidence is critical for helping institutions already pursuing guided pathways to stay the course and for convincing more institutions to undertake this ambitious and challenging work. Institutional leaders and policymakers also need more insights into the state-level policies and funding models that support sustained implementation.

In addition to supporting holistic evaluations of guided pathways, we will be supporting the development of evidence on adaptations that better support the learner populations in Ascendium’s North Star and on several specific component practices of guided pathways that are critical to the overall success of whole-college reform. More evidence is needed to understand the following.

• How colleges make co-requisite models and other developmental education reforms effective for all students and whether those reforms, which have been proven effective in entry-level math and English, can be shown to increase student success in gateway courses in other disciplines, such as science.
• How colleges in a range of contexts implement and finance case management advising, and what impacts different advising approaches have on learner outcomes.
• How colleges in a range of contexts map programs to jobs, engage employers, and help students learn about labor market opportunities. 

Evaluating component practices can help colleges better determine how best to implement specific practices, in which order to tackle them, and how to direct limited resources.

Ascendium and our partners will be answering these critical questions about this community college reform over the next five years. We are excited to continue to support the expansion and refinement of guided pathways and the building of evidence to understand its impact on postsecondary education and career outcomes for learners from low-income backgrounds.