CCRC’s 2025 book, More Essential Than Ever: Community College Pathways to Educational and Career Success, takes stock of what we have learned over a decade of research on the guided pathways whole-college reform model for improving college completion, and identifies key next frontiers for further innovation. To achieve better outcomes—and recruit and retain more students in today’s competitive higher education marketplace—community colleges will need to make concerted efforts to strengthen pathways to post-completion success in employment and further education, and thus ensure that students’ investment of time, effort, and money pays off.
The book presents five “next frontier” strategies colleges should pursue:
- Ensure that all programs lead to good jobs or efficient transfer in a major.
- Help students develop the versatile skills needed to pursue further education and thrive in a fast-changing workplace and society.
- Redesign recruitment and onboarding to help students explore, choose, plan, and gain momentum in a program of study.
- Enable busy students with many competing demands to complete their programs in as little time and with as little cost as possible.
- Rethink dual enrollment as a more equitable on-ramp to debt-free, career-connected education and training after high school.
In this project, CCRC will help colleges and state systems scale the next frontier pathways innovations detailed in More Essential Than Ever through several strands of work. Researchers will conduct applied research on how colleges are managing, funding, and sustaining efforts to expand and diversify high-demand programs in technology fields; develop new frameworks and data tools to formatively evaluate and continuously improve the efforts colleges are making to expand and diversify programs that prepare students for living-wage jobs or efficient transfer to a bachelor’s program; organize and lead a learning community involving colleges that have already implemented foundational completion-focused guided pathways practices to learn how colleges are implementing next frontier reforms; and develop workshop materials on the pathways next frontiers.
This project is supported by a grant from Ascendium Education Group.