Community colleges provide a viable arena for workforce development, but it is important that employers and business leaders also invest in employee development. This report identifies steps that employers/business leaders and community college boards can take to promote community colleges as a way to raise the level of skill in the American workforce, including partnering in the development of curriculum and training programs. The authors provide examples from current programs and initiatives.

In 2009, the Breaking Through initiative awarded grants to five participating schools to help them scale up their efforts in improving career and technical education for low-skilled students. The case studies presented here explore the strategic approaches of each school (e.g., financial incentives, advising and student supports, revised curricular alignment, external workforce partnerships) and the successes and challenges of bringing these efforts to scale.

Created for Achieving the Dream participants, this step-by-step planning guide focuses on seven key principles for building effective dialogues around improvement efforts, including engaging diverse and representative participants, hosting conversations with well-trained moderators, and following up to create ongoing relationships. The planning guide, available in both English and Spanish, includes a comprehensive moderator’s guide, sample invitations, and schedules.

Often unaware of financial aid resources and employment services available on campus, many community college students struggle to get the support they need and end up leaving, never attaining their degree or certificate. This documentation study examines how integrated service delivery, specifically the Center for Working Families (CWF) bundled approach, is being implemented at ten community colleges to achieve improved postsecondary outcomes for low-income students. The authors discuss the diverse ways that these community colleges have deployed the CWF approach, while presenting key findings on implementation and lessons related to data tracking, bundling of services, and sustainability. Using case studies and brief descriptions, the report describes each of the ten community colleges’ CWF program or implementation process. 

In hopes of developing a more stable workforce, many companies are developing programs to train entry-level employees for advancement within the organization. This report draws on interviews with nearly 60 companies to explore their methods of establishing employee development programs and the beneficial results they have seen. The author provides specific examples of successful programs, as well as general guidelines for developing a employee training program, either within a company or in partnership with a community college or other organization.

Postsecondary institutions are faced with the tremendous challenge of how to improve student persistence. Open access institutions, which serve greater proportions of high-risk students, see even lower rates of retention and graduation than do selective institutions. Based on a study of four for-profit schools in Texas that had high graduation rates and low student loan default rates, this report describes what those institutions did to achieve such positive outcomes, particularly for these high-risk students. This study finds that among these institutions, a combination of key institutional practices aimed at retaining and graduating students along with establishment of a culture that emphasizes completion and job placement contributed to these schools’ abilities to support postsecondary student success.

Effective education reform constitutes an adaptive challenge; that is, it is complex, and even when effective solutions are found, little authority exists to impose their universal implementation. In this article, the authors draw on an example of foundation and school district partnership in Pittsburgh to examine the role of foundation leadership in helping stakeholders respond to adaptive challenges.

The nation has gaping economic needs that with training and education, could be filled by disconnected youth returning to school. This report offers a model based on successes in creating aligned pathways between community-based organizations, school districts, and postsecondary institutions targeted at putting off-track high school students and returning dropouts back on track through their first year of college. The Back on Track model features enriched and accelerated academic preparation, postsecondary bridging, and first-year supports. The authors present examples of current partnerships that work together to create this bridge, as well as policies to support the scaling up of this model

One of the stated missions of community colleges is to open the door to further postsecondary education, allowing students a lower-cost way to earn initial college credit that can later be transferred to a four-year institution. However, as the authors state, disconnected institutional cultures often impede students from successfully transitioning from community colleges to four-year programs. This paper sets out practices that can be implemented to build a transfer-going culture on both sides of the postsecondary equation and provides case studies of how these have been enacted in California.

While the Latino population in the United States continues to grow, college completion rates remain low for Latino students. Improving degree attainment among Latinos is vital to reaching the nation’s educational goals. To that end, this guide outlines recommended actions and areas for consideration for policymakers at the community, college, state, and federal levels.

In Massachusetts, as in most states, there is an economic urgency in the next decade to educate students prepared for the changing workforce, one which requires the completion of some postsecondary education. This report relies on previous studies to create momentum around a new effort to align postsecondary education and training in Massachusetts’s 15 community colleges with the state’s workforce development needs. The authors discuss how Massachusetts’s community college system compares to others as far as governance and funding, and present effective systems that are currently meeting the workforce needs in other states. They also describe innovative programs within individual community colleges in Massachusetts that could serve as models for workforce programs and partnerships, as well as the challenges to systemic improvement in aligning community colleges to the Commonwealth state’s workforce needs.