Strengthening Community College Pathways to Post-Completion Success: Lessons From a Decade of CCRC Research

By Davis Jenkins, Hana Lahr, John Fink, Serena C. Klempin, and Maggie P. Fay

In a new book to be published in August, More Essential Than Ever: Community College Pathways to Educational and Career Success, we take stock of what we have learned over nearly a decade of research on the guided pathways model for whole-college transformation. The book provides practical guidance for community colleges on meeting the challenges they face today. Chief among these are increasing student persistence and completion and building back enrollment in a fiercely competitive higher education marketplace. Over the next four months, CCRC will publish a series of blog posts highlighting key lessons from the forthcoming book.

The guided pathways model was first described in Redesigning America’s Community Colleges: A Clearer Path to Student Success, the 2015 book by Thomas R. Bailey, Shanna Smith Jaggars, and Davis Jenkins that helped to catalyze a national community college reform movement. Since then, hundreds of colleges have implemented guided pathways practices. Our new book draws on research at many of these colleges to better understand how community colleges can improve educational and career outcomes for their students and better supply talent for their communities in a time of intense challenge but also great opportunity for these essential institutions.

More Essential Than Ever: Community College Pathways to Educational and Career Success by Davis Jenkins, Hana Lahr, John Fink, Serena C. Klempin, and Maggie P. Fay will be released in August 2025.

Preorder now from Harvard Education Press and use sales code HCPR25 to save 20%.

Based on two major CCRC evaluations of guided pathways reforms at over 90 colleges nationally, we conclude that whole-college redesign is possible but that it takes time—at least five years—and requires consistent, committed leadership and engagement across the institution. Colleges that implemented at scale a complementary set of practices across the four guided pathways “pillars” aimed at helping students choose and gain momentum in a program saw promising improvements in leading indicators of higher completion rates. Yet, while these metrics improved across student groups, gaps between groups remained, suggesting that the original guided pathways model by itself will not necessarily close gaps in outcomes.

Moreover, in the period when we were studying early guided pathways reforms, community colleges were losing enrollment. COVID caused a further sharp drop in students attending community colleges. While enrollments have recovered somewhat since the pandemic, the number of older returning students is at historic lows. And despite steady growth over two decades in high school dual enrollment students—who now account for more than 1 in 5 community college enrollments—the rate at which high school graduates enter community colleges directly after graduation has fallen. Bachelor’s-seeking students who in the past might have started at a community college and transferred are going directly to a four-year institution instead. These trends mean many community colleges—particularly small institutions and those that lack local tax-base support—face an uncertain financial future, especially now that federal COVID relief funding has ended.

The reasons for community college enrollment declines are complex. But one likely factor is that a growing segment of the public and many prospective students are questioning whether a college education is worth the cost. The public generally perceives that community colleges provide higher value than four-year institutions. Not surprisingly, however, former community college students are much more likely to say their experience was worth it when they have earned a credential and secured a well-paying job or when they have successfully transferred to a four-year program. Yet most students who start at a community college don’t complete any credential, and many of those who do aren’t able to secure a living-wage job or transfer without excess credits in their major field of interest.

Through field research at nearly 50 colleges implementing guided pathways reforms, we found that most of the early work focused on removing institutional barriers and helping students navigate into and through programs of study. This makes sense because the model presented in Redesigning was intended to address the main challenge community colleges faced at the time: low completion rates. Since Redesigning was published in 2015, CCRC has been able to study how colleges working on guided pathways responded to more recent pressures to ensure that students not only complete programs but also are prepared for success after graduation.

The thesis of More Essential Than Ever is that while removing barriers to completion is critically important, to achieve better outcomes—and recruit and retain more students—community colleges today 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 effort, time, and money pays off.

The new book presents strategies and actions colleges can take to achieve this in five “next frontiers” for further innovation. These innovations build from the original four pillars of the completion-focused guided pathways model presented in Redesigning America’s Community Colleges, but they reflect the new imperative to deliver more value for the cost:

1. Work with employers and four-year institutions to ensure that all programs lead to living-wage, career-path jobs or seamless transfer with no excess credits in students’ major fields of interest.
2. Help students develop the communication, problem-solving, and quantitative skills as well as the technological know-how needed to thrive in a fast-changing workplace and society.
3. Redesign recruitment and onboarding to help students explore, choose, plan, and gain momentum in a program of study.
4. Enable busy students with many competing demands to complete their programs in as little time and cost as possible.
5. Rethink dual enrollment as a more effective on-ramp to debt-free, career-connected education and training after high school.

These next frontier innovations are designed to help colleges improve enrollment, retention, and completion in at least three ways: (a) ensuring programs are worth completing in that they enable students to achieve goals for employment and further education; (b) making sure students can complete these programs in a timely and affordable manner; and (c) motivating students to enroll in them by helping them explore, choose, plan, and gain momentum in a program of study aligned with their interests, strengths, and aspirations.

The overall approach to implementing these innovations is to start with student end goals in mind—securing a good job or transferring seamlessly—and backward design programs, teaching and learning, retention supports, and program recruitment and onboarding (including building on-ramps from high school). The book presents case studies of colleges that have scaled reforms on these frontiers, along with strategies colleges have used to successfully lead and manage them. We also devote a chapter to discussing how states can help spread and sustain these innovations across college systems.

CCRC has already begun studying these and other colleges and state systems working on pathways frontier reforms. For example, in our Unlocking Opportunity partnership with the Aspen Institute College Excellence Program, we are working with and learning from 10 vanguard colleges seeking to scale strategies presented in the new book to expand and diversify enrollment and completion of programs that prepare students for good jobs or successful transfer.

In the coming months, CCRC will share with the field key lessons from the book through this blog series and through webinars and presentations with national and state partners. We will also be launching an effort to build and share a new set of research-based guidance, evaluation metrics and tools, and professional learning resources to help colleges and state systems scale and measure the effects of the frontier strategies detailed in the book. As in the past, we will carry out this work in close partnership with colleges and state systems implementing these reforms. That way, we can continue to learn alongside innovative educators seeking to strengthen pathways to educational and career success and thus deliver value for their students, communities, and states.