How the US’s Most Ambitious Plan to Remake Community College Cratered

A decade ago, advocates for community colleges coalesced around an ambitious package of reforms aimed at raising the institutions’ dismal graduation rates. Guided pathways, as these reforms are called, aimed to get new students to choose in their first year a program leading to a bachelor’s degree or a good job in a field that interested them, and then help them keep to it with a lot of proactive advising, clear direction and other support services as needed. If the premise sounds simple, implementing it would be anything but—guided pathways amounted to almost a complete redesign of how these schools serve students.

Fifteen states developed programs to help schools adopt these difficult and transformative reforms. Many of these followed a model used by the American Association of Community Colleges to train 43 schools around the country, with funding from the Gates Foundation, according to Davis Jenkins, a Columbia University researcher who largely developed the reforms and the training programs.