Guided Pathways: A Resource Guide

Increasingly, colleges and universities across the country are adopting “guided pathways” reforms to create clearly defined, educationally coherent pathways into and through programs of study for their students. Facilitated by built-in supports, the goal of guided pathways is to increase learning and graduation rates, and to help more students complete programs that lead to career advancement and further education as efficiently as possible.

The author of this brief examines data from 48 interviews with first-year students at City Colleges of Chicago (CCC)—a large urban community college system with seven campuses that since 2010 has been implementing guided pathways—to understand students’ reactions to CCC’s ambitious, system-wide reform. A large majority of the students were enthusiastic about program maps and educational planning—hallmarks of the guided pathways approach—yet a few students had negative reactions to these very same elements of the reform. And nearly half the students reported that they experienced problems with activities such as registration and course planning while new systems and practices were being deployed by the college, pointing to substantial implementation challenges.

For each area of practice, the authors highlight innovations the colleges have implemented that can serve as building blocks as they continue to implement guided pathways reforms more broadly. The report includes recommendations for the Ohio colleges as they build on and better align these innovations in ways that help students choose, enter, and complete programs of study that are designed to prepare them to succeed in employment and further education. The report concludes with a brief description of the next phase of research with Ohio partners.