Achieving Pathways Goals with Student-Centered Design

The emerging student demographic is underserved by legacy college practices. While the student profile at community colleges has changed dramatically in recent years, the practices and norms in place on college campuses—from course scheduling to career advising—have not. As a result, students do not receive the support they need in order to graduate or transfer on time, resulting in low and stagnant completion rates. This is a significant cause for concern as labor market needs and performance-based funding initiatives continue to put pressure on community colleges to boost student outcomes.

Failing to provide structure has cascading negative consequences. A growing number of college students arrive on campus with a limited understanding of the academic and career opportunities available to them. The traditional cafeteria model of program selection fails to address this knowledge gap by presenting students with an excess of choices and very little direction on how to make informed decisions. Coupled with infrequent advising touches, this leads to excess credit accumulation, unnecessary delays, and regular stop-outs.

The goals of colleges and their students rarely align. Prioritizing external trends or administrative goals over student needs results in policies and practices that fail to account for the real-life challenges students encounter on college campuses. Recognizing students’ goals—as well as the roadblocks they face while trying to achieve those goals—is fundamental to cultivating a culture of student success. Colleges must reframe their institutional focus to align with those needs.

Colleges can offer students structure without sacrificing opportunities for exploration. While an exhaustive list of program and course options can overwhelm students, a “one size fits all” approach to academic programming fails to provide them with the opportunity to explore various interests and opportunities on campus. The cornerstone of Guided Pathways is a balance of structure and flexibility which, much like a GPS system, provides students with clear directions for completion while also allowing for self-directed exploration. Similar to how a GPS-based application guides a traveler from point A to point B, Guided Pathways charts an optimal course for community college students from enrollment to completion. The optimal route may be a straight line (i.e., accumulation of credits in as efficient a manner as possible) or a scenic path (i.e., accrual of credits from a variety of programs), depending on the needs of the student.

The push for cross-campus action minimizes the importance of principled and sequential action. While momentum around Guided Pathways has grown substantially, this has at times led to colleges attempting to implement all aspects of the complex reform at once, without a structured action plan. As a result, administrators are unable to effectively prioritize time and resource allocation, creating unnecessary delays. Instead, institutions should formulate a sequential implementation plan based on their current organizational structure and student needs to ensure an effective and efficient roll-out.

Successful reform requires—but often lacks—widespread commitment to a student-centric approach. To effectively implement Guided Pathways, colleges must ensure faculty and staff share the goals of the administration and demonstrate readiness to implement substantial curricular reform through a student-centric approach. However, widespread engagement is often difficult to come by, and administrators struggle to craft policies that incorporate faculty input while placing student needs first. Failing to cultivate buy-in around a student-centric approach results in inconsistencies in reform roll-outs and messaging to students.

Defaulting to the curricular status quo keeps roadblocks to success in place for at-risk students. While many colleges roll over existing course sequences and requirements from year to year, doing so fails to address common student challenges of accessing gateway courses and completing all program requirements in a timely manner. Administrators must be willing to rethink their program design processes and use the student perspective, along with effective design principles, to create program maps that promote on-time completion.

Administration should partner with academic leaders to ensure that program design balances noncompeting needs for structure and exploration. Guided Pathways aims to remedy the problems created by the traditional “cafeteria” model of course selection through the use of structured program maps and meta-majors, which outline clear paths to completion and encourage career and academic exploration. Constructing program maps and meta-majors that incorporate effective design principles, faculty and staff input, and clear messaging allows colleges to balance students’ needs for structure and exploration.

Next, course scheduling must be crafted to match student capacity requirements driven by data and student insights. Registration obstacles, including under- and over-filled classes, unpredictable schedules, and prioritization of total credit accumulation, are consistently cited by students as major barriers to success. By introducing structured program maps, Guided Pathways provides the opportunity for administrators to predict and respond to student scheduling needs in order to avoid common registration pain points. Understanding students’ progress within a pathway can also aid staff in making decisions about registration priorities

Rather than focus on the quantity of advisors, colleges should prioritize efficient delivery of high-quality advice that fosters goal-based student decisions. As colleges implement Guided Pathways and reform their curricular design and scheduling practices, the burden of determining course schedules is reduced for advisors. As a result, their role must be reformulated to focus on assisting students with setting and achieving long-term goals. In order to conduct this work at scale, colleges should rethink traditional formats of advising delivery and consider innovating on channels of delivery. We recommend a hybrid approach that integrates technology, rethinks face-to-face engagement, and provides professional training for all in advisory positions.

Colleges should design pathways that serve students’ need for flexible on- and off-ramps. Despite their best efforts, many community college students encounter off-campus obstacles that can block their path to completion. Responsive institutions that are able to provide these students with the resources necessary to get back on track will ultimately have success in serving the needs and boosting the outcomes of their students. Offering flexible financial aid and make-up course opportunities allows students to quickly and seamlessly get back on a path to completion.

Mapping committees at St. Petersburg College use sticky notes to physically map out potential sequences, balancing transparency and efficiency. Committees include a small but diverse sample of faculty and staff, in order to ensure that program maps contain the requisite content, general education, and prerequisite courses. During mapping sessions, committee members write the name of each course on a sticky note and then collectively sketch out program maps using their shared knowledge. This allows for revisions to be made quickly and transparently and a consensus to be reached in a timely manner.

Though faculty committees can prove efficient in mapping program sequences, conflicts over committee leadership can pose residual challenges. Faculty tend to advocate for the courses they teach, often without considering the broader aims of the program. They also have a limited understanding of the general education and prerequisite courses included in their program. On the other hand, deans are often unfamiliar with the content knowledge provided by all of the courses within their departments and struggle to optimize program efficiency while maintaining departmental morale.

Traditional approaches to curricular development often result in a single faction being charged to lead, resulting in suboptimal program development and diminished engagement across the board. Therefore, effective program mapping must allow for shared ownership of the sequencing process across campus knowledge bases.

Current ownership limitations to mapping processes

Faculty skeptical of change

• Misalignment between individual incentives and best choice for program
• Tension between personal experience and entrenched program norms
• Lack of knowledge about prerequisite courses to include

Dean incentives misaligned

• Tension between optimizing program sequence and decline in division size
• Fear of appearing biased by prioritizing certain classes or faculty over others
• Hard to distill current state of programs within their division

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Linn-Benton Community College relies on a crowdsourcing technique to elicit participation in program-map construction across campus. Using a simple web tool that has program courses preloaded, Linn-Benton faculty are invited to submit proposed program maps to advising staff, who use this input to construct the final maps. This allows for widespread participation in the mapping process while avoiding the contentious question of who will “lead.”

Faculty have the option of constructing part-time (9 credits) and full-time (15 credits) maps, as well as offering alternative course suggestions in an open-field text box. This flexible and easily implemented format gives all faculty at the college the opportunity to be involved in the program-mapping process and to leverage their program-specific knowledge.

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Jackson College in Michigan proactively involved on-campus and community stakeholders in the meta-major formation process, ensuring that their offerings were informative and easy to understand. Administrators at Jackson invited stakeholders to campus, and through a series of interviews, gained insight into the competencies most desired by local employers. From these interviews, they extracted three essential competencies and created six clearly defined meta-majors around these competencies.

Jackson administrators identified three key lessons from their community engagement efforts:

• Interviews with stakeholders should be concise and to the point
• To ensure that diverse perspectives are represented, both internal and external stakeholders should be consulted
• It’s critical to reassess responses on a regular basis, in order to track progress

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Colleges looking to bypass disagreements about meta-major composition should consider approaches that rely on easily accessed program data to construct curriculum maps. At Jackson College, a series of student information system (SIS) data queries determines the frequency of each course within meta-major programs. This information is then used to construct curriculum maps that place the highest-frequency courses for programs within a meta-major in the first semester, allowing students to potentially switch programs without accumulating extra credits.

Jackson also uses the data it collects to set major decision points, ideally after as many common semesters as possible. On average, this has allowed students an additional three months to explore programs within a meta-major without accruing excess credits. It also has led to a significant decrease in advisor meetings dedicated to answering navigation questions, freeing up advisors to have more substantive conversations with students.

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Middlesex Community College uses a visually appealing and jargon-free template to present Pathways to students, advisors, and faculty. Their interactive checklist provides students with a view of an entire program map with program requirements clearly labeled and course names presented in simple terms. This easy-tonavigate platform gives students a clear picture of what is required for completion and allows them to track their own progress through a given program.

Administrators at Middlesex have found that implementing this new template has greatly improved their advising function, reducing advising errors by 12% since its launch. This frees up advisors’ time to focus on assisting students in developing long-term academic and career goals.

Using a graphical template with informal language also eliminates the confusing process of sifting through jargon-filled pages and gives students an immediate overview of their designated pathways. The opportunity to “check off” completed requirements also acts as a motivational tool for students, as they are able to track their degree progress.

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Monroe Community College uses their curricular maps, along with student enrollment data, to inform the master schedule. This scheduling strategy takes into account students’ progress within a particular program, as well as current and historical registration rates, in order to predict course demand with a high degree of accuracy.

To execute this process, an administrator runs an SIS query during the open registration period to determine how many students are enrolled in a course, as well as their progress within their program. Then, to predict demand, a second query shows the registration numbers for that course on the same date one year prior, the enrollment on the first day of class the prior year, and the enrollment at the census date the prior year. Results from these queries are shared with the department chairs so they can determine the need for additional sections of a course.

Additionally, Monroe creates course offerings within the registration system that are initially invisible to students. If the visible sections fill up, these “shadow sections” become available. This provides the college with sufficient course capacity regardless of how many students persist term to term.

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Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C) leverages course-level enrollment data to create a guaranteed course schedule across multiple terms based on student and faculty demand. This system relies on existing student information to construct schedules, the viability of which are then tested using various student profiles (e.g., part-time status). Course modality, time of day, and campus location information are all considered as factors that may discourage student registration and are adjusted based on target student needs.

Three strategies are critically important in making this process effective. First, administrators must understand which student profiles their institution serves and consider how particular scheduling decisions may impact them differentially. Next, administrators set a threshold for the guarantee, which determines exactly how many students must enroll in order to offer the course as promised.

Finally, administrators emphasize the importance of communicating which courses are guaranteed and exactly what a “guaranteed course” means in the context of the academic catalog. This includes specifying the modality, campus, and timing of guaranteed courses so that students can be informed of what to expect in future terms and plan accordingly.

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This staffing challenge results from curriculum mapping, meta-major creation, and scheduling changes that require faculty to alter their daily work habits and, in some cases, displace the need for their expertise. Sinclair Community College leveraged their prior experience with developmental education reform to proactively assess and retrain their faculty to accommodate shifting course demands.

Administrators reviewed existing faculty credentials as well as the amount and cost of retraining required to equip them to teach related disciplines. They found that the cost of hiring new adjuncts to meet shifting enrollment needs was higher than the cost of additional training for their current faculty. Their solution was to pay for faculty to receive relevant training in their new discipline from an area four-year institution. This approach ultimately saved the college money, removed the cost burden of retraining from faculty members, and ensured that institutional capacity for offering default electives accommodated enrollment data.

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Administrators at California Polytechnic State University instituted a comprehensive prioritization system to ensure students are able to get into urgently needed courses. Their approach prioritizes credits needed for completion—rather than overall credit accumulation—so that students who are furthest along in a program are given the earliest registration dates and times. This encourages students to earn productive credits and rewards them for making progress toward completion.

Administrators developed an online dashboard where students can view a meter that tracks their degree progress. This indicator serves as a light nudge to students to consider how their course plans contribute to their completion goals, while the priority registration window serves as a short-term reward for achieving those goals. The registrar uses this data to assign registration and wait-list priority so students nearing completion can quickly graduate.

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Yakima Valley Community College combined faculty academic content knowledge and advisor career guidance during a daylong, campus-wide event to help students pick a meta-major or major depending on their degree progress. The event replaces one instructional day several weeks before the next term’s registration deadline, giving students sufficient time to revise their schedules as needed.

Elements of Yakima Valley’s advising day

• Multiple start times: Repeats up to four times to help working students attend
• Knowledge exchange: All related program personnel present to share information
• Faculty introductions: Student rosters help faculty speak to or refer every student
• Concrete next steps: Students select program of study and register for next term

Each meta-major advising day is designed with students’ academic and career goals in mind. For example, a student interested in a health science career can learn about the various program offerings during the event. If he or she is weighing the trade-offs between a nursing assistant and phlebotomy career track, the student can consult with faculty in both specialties. Meanwhile, students who remain undecided can self-select a meta-major of interest and in an open-table format speak with faculty, who help parse out their decision and recommend a different discipline if necessary.

By incorporating knowledge from across the campus into their advising day, Yakima Valley ensures that students receive accurate, actionable information that directs them to select a program of study that fits their needs and interests.

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The first-year-experience course has recently gained prominence as a way to help orient students to college. Institutions can maximize the impact of these courses by supplementing traditional instruction on study habits
and note-taking with early, consistent guidance that translates career goals into academic behaviors and helps students understand how to navigate college bureaucracy. Well-designed first-year pathway exploration courses
give students extended exposure to programs and careers within each meta-major, increasing their understanding of how their skills and interests align with the associated long-term career and academic outcomes.

While many institutions already include a first-year-experience course in their program maps, administrators can improve the quality of existing courses by incorporating career assessments, introducing pathways exploration, and embedding internship and other experiential learning opportunities. Requiring students to enroll in the firstyear-experience course during their first semester accelerates their exposure to accurate career and academic advice, which reduces excess credit accumulation and results in a 15% decrease in time to degree.

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In 2013, Alamo Colleges enlisted the National Academic Advising Association to help implement a professional advising model across their campus, in order to provide students with more structured, comprehensive
guidance. At the time, they struggled with inadequate student-to-advisor ratios and a largely fragmented advising system. Most important, however, their advisors were spending their limited amount of time on lower-order advising priorities instead of engaging students in substantive discussions about their academic and career goals.

Contrast in top-line functions reveals new professional role

Typical Advisor:

• Helps students with registration and scheduling
• Answers transfer and articulation policy questions
• Understands institutional policies and procedures

Transactional: Exchanges basic information with students
Redundant: Provides answers available online

Alamo College’s Advisors:

• Provides advising to students from entry to completion
• Provides pathway exploration and career planning
• Implements academic advising strategies and achievement of student learning outcomes

Comprehensive: Guides students throughout college experience
Goal-Oriented: Connects academic choices to career goals and interests

In contrast with the typical responsibilities allocated to an advisor, many of which are transactional and even redundant in nature, Alamo’s current advising model emphasizes the new priorities of a professional goal-setting advisor. It incorporates the key benefit of success coaches—personalized, intrusive advising practices—into the overarching goal of academic and career planning.

Alamo has also adopted a case management approach, which pairs an advisor with an individual student for his or her entire time on campus. This allows advisors to develop more personalized relationships with their
students and gain a better understanding of their long-term goals.

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In order to prevent these high-achieving students from stopping out of the college altogether, Volunteer State Community College takes a proactive approach by identifying at-risk students in advance and offering them alternative opportunities that still fit their long-term goals. Partnering with a data analytics team, Vol State matches students with a new major that aligns with their career interests and minimizes the amount of excess credits needed for completion. Once a match has been found, advisors send students an “acceptance letter,” congratulating them on their achievement and highlighting the opportunities presented by the new program.

The experience of being turned away from a dream program or career is a distressing one for students. Vol State advisors are sensitive to this and are careful to present the program switch as an accomplishment and a chance for students to embrace new opportunities. They are also proactive in following up with students who don’t respond to their acceptance letter, in order to ensure that all students receive a face-to-face meeting in order to discuss their future prospects.

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The University of Maine reinvented their approach to intersessions in order to specifically help students who have fallen behind credit pace by offering additional sections of major requirement and bottleneck courses. Courses were taught in a condensed format and available entirely online, making them widely accessible to students. The university also decided to bill the intersession period as part of the spring term, which allows students to apply their spring financial aid to intersession courses. This also benefits part-time students who need to reach the minimum 12-credit, federal financial aid threshold.

As a result of this restructuring, UMaine has seen a significant increase in the number of credits being earned during the Winter intersession. Student performance in critical, degree-advancing courses has also improved,
suggesting that students benefit from the flexible format offered in the winter.

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Amarillo College transformed the mini-semester idea from a second-chance “guardrail” to a default college schedule. Instead of two optional mini-semesters, Amarillo made eight-week mini-mesters the default for all
students and added two additional sessions in the summer, effectively creating a viable year-round calendar.

Because this format expands the overall teaching calendar for faculty, colleges must also raise their base pay for “nontraditional” courses, such as those taught over the summer. Amarillo increased summer faculty course pay from 75% to 100% of normal compensation to incentivize larger course loads.

The shift to a year-round mini-mester schedule has proved to be beneficial for students and the college. Course completion rates have risen 30%, and Amarillo is projecting that the new system will bring in $10M in additional
revenue.

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