Davis Jenkins is a senior research scholar at the Community College Research Center and research professor in the Department of Education Policy and Social Analysis at Columbia University’s Teachers College. He works with colleges, schools, community groups, and employers in communities and states across the country to find ways to improve educational and employment outcomes for students from groups that have been poorly served by the U.S. educational system.
His research has helped inspire large-scale institutional reforms to improve educational and career outcomes for community college students, including career pathways, adult contextualized basic skills training (such as I-BEST), guided pathways, and dual enrollment equity pathways, or DEEP.
Together with Thomas Bailey and Shanna Jaggars, he co-authored the 2015 book, Redesigning America’s Community Colleges: A Clearer Path to Student Success, which helped to catalyze the national guided pathways whole-college reform movement. In a new book, More Essential Than Ever: Community College Pathways to Educational and Career Success, he and his colleagues take stock of what they have learned from a decade of research on guided pathways reforms at over 100 colleges nationally. The book presents five strategies leading-edge colleges are implementing, building on early guided pathways reforms, to ensure their programs have strong value for employment and further education after completion, and thus are worth the time, money and effort students invest to enroll in and complete them.
Jenkins earned a PhD in public policy analysis from Carnegie Mellon University and a BA in religion from Princeton University.
