Introducing CCRC’s Summer 2022 Guided Pathways Institute Cohort

By Sarah Griffin and Hana Lahr

CCRC’s Guided Pathways Summer Institute is back! Following a competitive application and interview process, 22 teams representing 24 colleges in 18 states were selected for the 2022 institute, which will be held over two sessions in June and July.

2022 Guided Pathways Institute Colleges

While last year’s institute focused on rural and rural-serving community colleges, this year CCRC opened the institute to all colleges. The 24 colleges that have been selected to participate include 12 that are rural or rural-serving and 12 located in larger metropolitan areas. Besides their geographic differences, nine colleges are small (< 5,000 students year-round), six colleges are medium-sized (5,000–9,999 students), and nine colleges are large (> 10,000 students).

The Content of the Institute

Though the colleges are diverse, they all share an interest in promoting upward social and economic mobility in their communities. By implementing guided pathways, they will be working to ensure that all students can explore, enter, and complete programs that lead to family-sustaining jobs or transfer to a four-year institution without excess credits.

To help them launch their guided pathways reforms, the institute will lead teams of eight to 12 faculty, staff, and administrators through exercises to explore their data and plan reforms to their colleges' new student onboarding practices.

The colleges will examine data on student enrollment, coursetaking, and completion by program and consider the implications of these data for college redesign. Through this examination, the colleges will be better positioned to design and implement onboarding reforms that will support all students while adapting reforms to meet students' diverse needs and educational and career goals.

The colleges will also reimagine new student onboarding through CCRC’s research-based “Ask-Connect-Inspire-Plan” (ACIP) framework. Our national research shows that efforts to help students identify a program of study aligned with their interests, strengths, and aspirations improve student retention. During the institute, participating colleges will learn about the ACIP framework and discuss how it can be used to support pathways reforms.

By the end of the institute, each team will develop a customized plan to engage their college community in conversations about implementing reforms to onboarding and related areas of practice that will help the college recruit and retain students in high-opportunity programs connected to their long-term goals.

Through the institute, CCRC will continue to learn about the challenges and opportunities for whole-college transformation in different institutional contexts. In the coming months, we will release several reports based on what we learned from the 2021 institute, and we plan to share what we learn from the 2022 cohort over the next year.

We are grateful to the Ascendium Education Group for supporting CCRC’s summer institutes.

Institute Participants

Session I

Session II

Hana Lahr is a senior research associate and program lead at CCRC. Sarah Griffin is a research associate at CCRC.