Publications

Based on fieldwork at four guided pathways colleges, this report introduces a cross-sector pathways model and highlights emerging practices and strategies that community colleges are using to build stronger connections with employers, universities, and K-12 schools.

This report describes how CCRC’s thinking about guided pathways has evolved since the publication of Redesigning America’s Community Colleges in 2015.

This report examines how Ohio community colleges—which have been engaged in guided pathways reform for several years—are innovating within the model to provide scaled, personalized support to help students gain early academic momentum.

This brief discusses why whole-college, guided pathways reforms hold promise for improving student success on a large scale, what they cost, and how the federal government can support their adoption.

Drawing on interview data, this report discusses strategies that three guided pathways colleges use to help adult students enter programs of study, stay on path, and enhance learning.

Using nine years of data from one state, this paper tracks completion and transfer outcomes to examine when gaps between Black, Hispanic, and White community college students occur, and it estimates the benefits of reaching early academic milestones for such students.

Drawing on research at six institutions, this guide is intended to help community college leaders understand the costs involved in implementing guided pathways reforms and develop plans for funding and sustaining them.

Drawing on data from 12 community colleges, this paper analyzes the resources required to implement guided pathways reforms and examines their feasibility and affordability, as well as their value for students.

Using state administrative data and propensity score matching, this study examines the characteristics and academic outcomes of community college students who switch majors.

Using administrative data from Florida, this article examines the effect of changing the grading scale from whole-letter grades to plus/minus grades on STEM major choice.

Using data from the Education Longitudinal Study and a propensity score matching approach, this paper compares outcomes of four-year college students who earned either 1–10 credits or no credits at a community college.

This guide presents a set of example data analyses colleges can replicate to examine whether underserved groups of students are equitably represented in programs that lead to higher opportunity outcomes for employment and/or baccalaureate transfer.

This practitioner packet provides guidance to colleges seeking to redesign their new student onboarding practices to better help students explore, choose, and plan a program of study best suited to their interests and aspirations.

This study compares the out-of-sample predictive power of early momentum metrics—13 near-term success measures suggested by the literature—with that of metrics from machine-learning-based models that employ approximately 500 predictors for community college credential completion.

In this short essay, Shanna Jaggars (coauthor of Redesigning America's Community Colleges) and Amanda Folk (head of teaching and learning at the Ohio State Libraries) discuss how librarians' expertise could be harnessed to support guided pathways reforms.

This report and the five case studies that accompany it describe how institutions are managing the broad-based transformation of programs, student services, and related support systems using the guided pathways model.

In this brief, the authors examine how well nine measures of students’ progress in their first year predict student completion in subsequent years, and thus how suitable these early momentum metrics are as leading indicators of the effectiveness of institutional reforms.

This report describes the guided pathways reforms taking place at the 13 community colleges in the Tennessee Board of Regents, along with promising trends in first-year momentum among entering students.

This practitioner packet describes the guided pathways reform model; presents case studies of how colleges are approaching key pathways practices, with promising evidence on student success from early adopters; and outlines steps and a timeline for implementing guided pathways reforms.

This paper describes how degree-seeking students at the City Colleges of Chicago make choices about their programs in their first year of enrollment, focusing especially on how they interact with advisors and how they use college-based resources in program selection and program planning.