Every fall semester, first-time college students across the country embark on an academic journey full of promise. Unfortunately, some students do not make it to the finish line because they have trouble adjusting to the academic demands of college.
Academic institutions can be difficult to navigate, especially for students who do not have college-educated parents. At 4-year institutions, first-generation students are twice as likely than students whose parents have a bachelor’s degree to leave before their second year.
The high cost of tuition at public and private 4-year academic institutions is a hot topic in national media today. However, students face many financial barriers to degree completion introduced by expenses that aren’t fully covered by their financial aid packages.
The transition from high school to college can be difficult in the best of times, let alone during a global pandemic. Our previous post on Supporting Postsecondary Transitions During COVID-19 offers practical resources for supporting students and families navigating the college application and enrollment process during the pandemic.
The Center for the Future of Arizona (CFA), in partnership with LeadLocal and Jobs for the Future, worked with school districts in Arizona to increase high-need students’ access to quality career pathways in cybersecurity and computer science. In 2019, CFA received an early-phase Education Innovation and Research grant from the U.S. Department of Education to … Continue reading Evaluation of the Career Connected Pathways Project
In partnership with Achieving the Dream, SRI is studying how using OER materials can facilitate improved educational experiences for college students through easier access to learning materials and transformative teaching and learning practices.
This research brief summarizes student outcome findings from SRI International’s evaluation of the California Linked Learning District Initiative, an effort to build robust district-level systems to sustain high school career pathways in nine school districts in the state. With funding from The James Irvine Foundation, SRI conducted a rigorous multimethod evaluation of the initiative over … Continue reading Linked Learning Student Outcomes: Summary of Effects on High School and Early Postsecondary Education
Findings from Achieving the Dream’s Open Education Resources (OER) Degree Initiative, which helps colleges reduce the financial burden on students by developing course pathways using free and openly licensed instructional materials
The Open Educational Resources (OER) Degree Initiative, led by Achieving the Dream (ATD), seeks to boost college access and student success by supporting the redesign of courses needed for a degree using OER in place of proprietary instructional materials. ATD’s programs aim to help community colleges throughout the United States increase student success through data-informed … Continue reading Launching OER Degree Pathways: An Early Snapshot of Achieving the Dream’s OER Degree Initiative and Emerging Lessons
SRI examined the academic and economic impacts and implementation of the OER Degree Initiative. The OER Degree Initiative seeks to boost college access and completion, particularly for underserved students, by engaging faculty in the redesign of courses and degree programs through the replacement of proprietary textbooks with open educational resources (OER). SRI, along with partner … Continue reading OER Degree Initiative
The rapidly expanding Linked Learning approach blends career technical and college preparatory course sequence in a single high school pathway, representing the convergence of two strands of high school reform from the past thirty years. Using data from nine California districts, we examine the effect of high school Linked Learning participation on students’ early community … Continue reading Community College On-Track Indicators for Linked Learning Students
This research brief compares the postsecondary outcomes of students in certified Linked Learning pathways with those of peers with similar demographic characteristics and prior achievement in traditional high school programs. Certified pathways are those deemed to have met established quality standards through an external review. We found that Linked Learning students enrolled in college, remained … Continue reading Linked Learning and Postsecondary Transitions: A Report on the Early Postsecondary Education Outcomes of Linked Learning Students
This article presents two contrasting cases that represent the predominant approaches to engaging employers in workforce education programming: large-scale partnership and employer outreach. Project: Community College Partnership’s Instructional Impacts Download: Journal Article (PDF) Citation Yarnall, L., Tennant, L., & Stites, R. (2016). A framework for evaluating implementation of community college workforce education partnerships and programs. … Continue reading A framework for evaluating implementation of community college workforce education partnerships and programs
SRI Education and partners conducted a 6-year study of community college-employer collaboration to improve the design and delivery of workforce education programming. In the United States, headlines regularly describe the “skills gap” between what employers want and what workers can do. Historically, closing this gap has relied on an informal system of community college workforce … Continue reading Community College Partnership’s Instructional Impacts
Since the 1990s, federal programs for workforce training have aimed to transform the role of community colleges from narrow contract training to a broader role that encompasses strategic instructional program planning and innovation to support lifelong learning for a changing workforce and economic development. Yet, to date, there has been no study of how this … Continue reading Meeting 2020 Workforce Goals: The Role of Industry–College Collaboration and Goals for Instructional Design