Pathways to Success: A Resource Guide

2020 National Report from the Center for Community College Student Engagement (CCSE) presents the first national baseline data on student and faculty perceptions of guided pathways practices.

Bringing guided pathways to scale involves substantial redesign of students’ educational experience and touches every aspect of college operations. The guided pathways model (updated 2019) introduced below describes the critical steps colleges take as they do this challenging, complex work. (The Ensure Students Are Learning section was updated in 2019.)

Since the publication of Redesigning America’s Community Colleges, CCRC has continued to conduct research on guided pathways. A key focus of our work thus far has been to better understand what practices colleges are implementing as part of guided pathways reform and how are they managing the change process. (CCRC, November 2017–August 2020)

Education Dive, April 15, 2019

CBD launched in 2011 and completed in 2018, focused on efforts by nine community colleges in three states – Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio – to significantly boost student progression and success by reimagining key aspects of their academic programming and student services. The result? Participating colleges met their near-term targets on five key indicators (passage of introductory math, passage of introductory English, first term credit completion, first year credit completion, first year completion of classes in major) three years ahead of schedule.

Baker, R. (2016). The Effects of Structured Transfer Pathways in Community Colleges. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 38, 626 - 646.

Ashby, Hayley, "A Case Study of Strategic Governance in the Implementation of Guided Pathways at Scale at California Community Colleges" (2018). Dissertations. 214.
https://digitalcommons.brandman.edu/edd_dissertations/214. (Brandman University Digital Repository)

The Pathways Model is composed of essential institutional practices that help students along their journey to success. Toolkits from Center surveys that are aligned with dimensions of the Pathways Model.

These suggested program completion pathways for different term-by-term course loads outline the courses Sinclair Academic Advisors recommend taking each semester to stay on track and graduate on time for your chosen pathway type of part-time or full-time.

Search results for "guided pathways" on EAB's website. To access this content, please log in or register for a free guest account.

"For students to stay motivated to persist on their academic trajectory," she wrote, "they need to both see the destination (the careers and earnings an education will provide) and the pathway to get there (the connections between what they are doing in school and what they would like to achieve)." -- Elizabeth Mann Levesque

Community College Research Center (CCRC) works with major initiatives—such as Achieving the Dream and Completion by Design—that aim to improve student outcomes by helping colleges use data to implement significant institutional changes. CCRC also studies system-wide reform models, including performance funding, to identify practices that increase student success across colleges

The goal of this three-year project is to inform the development and adoption by community colleges of the guided pathways model for improving student outcomes and to develop guidance materials and tools that can be used by others in helping colleges plan and implement guided pathways. The American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) and other national partner organizations are designing and conducting a series of six two-and-a-half-day Pathways Institutes for teams from 30 community colleges that are committed to making the systemic changes in practice necessary to implement guided pathways at scale

As part of AAC&U's ongoing Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) initiative, AAC&U released The LEAP Challenge—calling on colleges and universities to engage students in Signature Work that will prepare them to integrate and apply their learning to a significant project with meaning to the student and to society.

Community colleges engaged in guided pathways reforms are revising the new student onboarding process. They are replacing what is often a set of disconnected and optional activities with a coherent series of curricular and co-curricular experiences that enable students to explore program options; network with faculty, students, and industry professionals in fields of interest; take program-specific courses; and create an educational plan that they and their advisors can use to monitor progress toward completion. 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.

More than 300 colleges across the country are implementing guided pathways reforms, all of them facing unique challenges and circumstances as they take on whole-college redesigns. This report, based on fieldwork CCRC conducted at eight of the 30 colleges in the first cohort of the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) Pathways Project, describes how institutions are managing the broad-based transformation of programs, student services, and related support systems involved in guided pathways reforms.

This practitioner packet is designed to help community college leaders and staff who are considering guided pathways reforms at their college. Part one, What We Know About Guided Pathways, describes the reform model and summarizes evidence supporting its design principles. Part two, Implementing Guided Pathways at Miami Dade College: A Case Study, describes how one college went about implementing guided pathways reforms (Community College Resource Center).

The Annual Conference on The First-Year Experience provides an ongoing forum where higher education professionals can share experiences, concerns, and accomplishments related to supporting student learning, development, and success in the first college year. We invite you to be a part of productive collaborations, conversations, and relationships. South Carolina, National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition. NOTE: The 40th Annual Conference on The First-Year Experience, scheduled to be held virtually Feb. 15-19, 2021. Early Registration: $285 prior to Jan. 7, 2021, afterwards: $475

AACU's annual Institute on Integrative Learning and Signature Work. The 2018 Institute on Integrative Learning and Signature Work is intended for college and university teams interested in developing faculty and staff leadership to advance programs and curricula that build students’ capacity to integrate their learning—across general education, majors, and the cocurriculum, as well as prior professional, academic, and life experiences inside and outside the classroom.

Project outcome description. The project launched in 2016 with four public institutions: Community College of Philadelphia; University of Houston–Downtown; University of Nevada, Las Vegas; and Winston-Salem State University. After a one-year planning process that saw campuses identifying barriers on their campuses, faculty teams finalized their project plans at AAC&U’s Institute on Integrative Learning and Signature Work.