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The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the highest unemployment that the U.S. has seen since the Great Depression, with particularly heavy job losses for Black, Hispanic, and Native American workers. In this set of studies commissioned by Lumina Foundation, the authors examine actions that states and community colleges can take to address the needs of racially minoritized adult learners who are pursuing postsecondary education and training as a path to re-employment, better jobs, and higher incomes. Study 1. Aligning Short-Term Credentials with Community College Degree Programs describes how some states are creating and scaling opportunities for adults to earn occupational certificates that employers value and that lead to associate and bachelor’s degrees. Study 2. Bundling and Sequencing Student Support Services explains how community colleges can improve the design and delivery of advising and other critical support services to help adults attain their education and employment goals. Study 3. Culturally Sustaining Supports and Instruction offers examples and guiding principles that colleges can use to create programs and services that address the interests and needs of adults from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, and that encourage persistence in and completion of postsecondary credentials. To describe these approaches and why they show promise, the authors draw on telephone interviews with state policymakers, community college leaders, and content area experts. Some of the policies and programs profiled have been evaluated; others represent promising strategies that will require further study to determine whether they improve education and employment outcomes and advance racial equity.

State systems have played an increasingly prominent role in encouraging community colleges to implement effective developmental education reforms, and some states have begun to recommend or require multiple measures assessment for placement. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic unexpectedly created opportunities for state systems to facilitate institutional adoption of multiple measures assessment. In spring 2020, as large numbers of colleges across the nation moved to remote learning and work, it was often infeasible to continue offering in-person, proctored placement tests. Institutions sought out new ways to assess and place students. This brief discusses four states—Indiana, Virginia, Texas, and Washington—that supported large-scale changes to placement practices, with greater emphasis on multiple measures. Based on interviews with system leaders and college administrators, faculty, and staff in these states, the authors of the brief present four short case studies that summarize how each state changed its placement policies and supported colleges in reaction to the pandemic. The brief addresses common multiple measures assessment implementation challenges such as facilitating buy-in; providing implementation support; combatting initiative fatigue; and establishing data-informed evaluation processes.

Community colleges across the country are engaging in large-scale, systemic change efforts that address multiple barriers to student success. This brief describes one such effort undertaken by Bronx Community College (BCC), part of the City University of New York (CUNY) system, in which college leaders built on an existing initiative to scale the Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) to catalyze a whole-college redesign. First piloted in 2007, ASAP provides eligible students with robust financial, academic, and personal support and has been shown to substantially increase three-year completion rates at CUNY’s community colleges. Since 2012, CUNY has increased ASAP enrollment to 25,000 across its seven community colleges. BCC, in close collaboration with CUNY’s Office of Academic Affairs, expanded the program to serve approximately 5,000 students—roughly 50% of its associate degree–seeking population—in the largest ASAP expansion in the CUNY system. This brief examines the relationship between BCC’s ASAP expansion and institutional change to illuminate how scaling a discrete reform can impact other areas of the college and change the way an institution serves all students. It also shares preliminary results from an internal evaluation of CUNY’s system-wide ASAP expansion, highlighting data from BCC. Overall, the authors' findings suggest that grounding institutional reform efforts in local programming functions provides an effective starting point for widespread change.

he City University of New York’s (CUNY) Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) provides wraparound services for eligible students, including financial, academic, and personal support. First piloted in 2007, ASAP has been shown to substantially increase three-year completion rates at CUNY’s community colleges. To build on the program’s early success, in 2011 CUNY began an initiative to expand its ASAP enrollment from around 1,300 students to 25,000 students in the 2018–19 academic year. CUNY selected Bronx Community College (BCC) for an especially ambitious project: BCC would become an “ASAP college,” increasing its program enrollment to around 5,000 students, or half of its student population, by 2018–19. This brief examines the expansion of ASAP and how the program was adapted in the process, using BCC as an illustrative case study. It highlights three implementation priorities underlying the expansion of ASAP at BCC for which adaptations were necessary: meeting enrollment targets; maintaining the student-advisor relationship component of ASAP; and staffing the program at scale. The brief documents how student recruitment and registration processes, advising and advisor training, and program staffing were adapted to meet these priorities.

Demographic and postsecondary enrollment data suggest that the proportion of community college students who need support to access curricula in English is large and will continue to grow in the coming years. Yet there is limited research on the postsecondary experiences and outcomes of these English learners, and most of the studies that are available focus exclusively on the subset of English learners who enroll in ESL courses. Informed by relevant research literature, this paper examines factors within the community college context that affect the experiences and academic outcomes of the English learner population broadly and, given that they can be more easily identified and have been the subject of much more study, students who enroll in ESL courses in particular. The paper describes English learners and their academic needs and strengths and provides a brief discussion of the national and state policy landscape regarding English learner students. It then provides perspectives from the research literature on ESL assessment and placement, instructional delivery, and student identity. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the implications of these findings for policy, practice, and future research. In June 2019 small revisions were made on pp. 13 and 16 of this paper to better clarify the influence of Assembly Bill 705 on English learners in California.

The Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the developer of the Dana Center Mathematics Pathways (DCMP) model, initiated the Mathematics Pathways to Completion (MPC) project to support each of six states in developing a broad statewide vision for mathematics pathways and a plan for institutional implementation of the DCMP model over three years. At institutions offering mathematics pathways, students take an introductory college-level mathematics course that is well matched with their major or program of study. The goal is to align students’ mathematics coursework with their academic and career needs, redirecting non-STEM students from lengthy algebraic-intensive course sequences. Importantly, students referred to developmental mathematics take preparatory coursework that is aligned to their particular introductory college-level mathematics course, often using an accelerated approach such as a corequisite model. Mathematics pathways are a promising approach for improving student outcomes, but if implementation happens one college at a time and without statewide policy support, the potential for scaling is diminished. This report describes the structure of the MPC project and the supports that the Dana Center is offering to participating states. In addition, drawing on 33 semi-structured interviews with mathematics faculty, state-level leaders, and technical assistance providers across the six states, this report explores the question: What state-level structures, conditions, and processes facilitate statewide implementation of mathematics pathways?

This paper documents the perceptions and experiences of faculty members in the midst of statewide reform efforts in Virginia and North Carolina to integrate developmental reading and writing courses. Using interview and focus group data from 161 faculty and administrators in both states (combined) as well as three detailed case studies of faculty teaching newly integrated courses, the authors describe how departments and faculty approached the task of course integration. While instructors had a generally positive impression of integrating the two disciplines, implementing these new courses was not without challenges. A common approach to course design, which the authors term “additive,” involved combining assignments and activities from the old standalone courses. They identify a range of factors associated with using the additive approach, including conceptions of literacy learning focused on the mastery of discrete skills, professional development aimed at exchanging activities and materials between reading and writing instructors, and lack of a clear framework for an integrated course design. Instructors using the additive approach reported that they could not cover all of the content/activities from the previous courses under the accelerated course structure, and worried they that they were not able to provide students the literacy skills they needed to be successful in college. Yet some faculty used or began to adopt an “integrative” approach to course design, in which few standalone components of the previously offered courses remained. Integrative course design tended to emphasize metacognition, extensive text-based writing, and embedded skills and strategy instruction, often offered in a “just-in-time” fashion. Faculty perceived that these more integrative course elements were associated with improved literacy learning. The findings presented have implications for creating support resources and professional development for departments and faculty who are new to teaching integrated reading and writing courses. The paper includes several curricular examples that can be adapted and used by faculty teaching integrated developmental courses.

This paper reports findings from a researcher-practitioner partnership that assessed the readiness for postsecondary reading and writing demands of 211 students in developmental reading and English courses in two community colleges. An assessment battery was designed for the study, comprising two standardized tests and five project-developed tasks. The project-developed measures were two text-based writing tasks similar to those typically assigned in college classrooms (a summarization task and a persuasive essay), a self-efficacy scale, a teacher judgment questionnaire, and a qualitative student retrospective report. The text-based writing measures were keyed to high-enrollment, introductory-level general education courses that had significant literacy demands. The results pointed to areas where students needed improvement in order to be ready for literacy tasks at the introductory postsecondary level. There was a discrepancy between the relatively low reading and writing skills as assessed through performance tasks and relatively high student self-efficacy ratings and teacher judgments. This finding suggests the possibility of an unrealistic amount of confidence in students’ ability to perform college-level reading and writing tasks. Correlations between assessment measures tended to be moderate, suggesting that the measures were tapping different skills. A series of hierarchical regressions modeling the text-based writing skills suggested that improvement in text-based summarization may require particular attention to reading comprehension skills, while improvement in text-based persuasive essay writing may depend more on developing general writing skills. Students’ retrospective reports indicated that although participants had some difficulty stating the requirements of the summarization task, they described appropriate strategies to complete it. Overall, the study’s findings point to the need to examine approaches to instruction, curriculum, course structure, and placement policy that may improve students’ college readiness.