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The current economic crisis hit Californians with less education hard and brought greater attention to the role public workforce training can play in an equitable recovery. To support workforce needs and the economic success of residents, California invests heavily in access to education beyond high school. The state deployed between $6 and $7 billion annually to workforce education in the years leading up to the pandemic. By understanding how best to target these investments, California can build training programs that offer the greatest benefit to workers and employers. The California community college system is the largest provider of publicly funded career education in the state. Community colleges are therefore critical for effective and equitable workforce training, even as the system has a governance and financing structure that creates challenges to connecting college programs to careers. Furthermore, we lack complete information about whether, how, and who completes job training programs in a timely manner and who then finds quality employment that offers economic mobility. To fill in some of these gaps, we investigate the trajectories of nearly one million students who have pursued career education at California community colleges over the last decade. We also use stakeholder interviews to probe how employers and workforce intermediaries support these students in completing programs and gaining skills valued in the labor market. We find: (1) The vast majority of students who pursue career education in the community colleges never earn a credential. One quarter of career education students earn a credential within six years; students who pursue health pathways are more successful--over half complete a credential within six years; (2) Students who earn an initial credential, re-enroll, and complete a second one in the same field--a stackable credential path--are even more rare. About 5 percent of all career education students earn multiple credentials in the same discipline, though this includes students who earn an associate degree. Among those who first earn a certificate, the share jumps to about 25 percent; (3) Students who complete credentials take about 2.5 years to do so. Even short-term certificates that require far fewer credits take students about two years; completing a stackable credential pathway takes over four years, on average; (4) Black and Latino students are less likely to complete a credential, as are younger students and men. Equity gaps in completion emerge relatively early, particularly for Black and younger students; (5) Students who complete at least one full-time term have much higher completion rates. These students also tend to earn credentials in a timely manner; and (6) Stakeholders cited challenges to partnerships with employers, including funding siloes, lack of resources, and coordination needed within individual colleges. Employer and industry partnerships with community colleges can create effective career education programs, and recent state and federal investments are supporting more strategic employer-college relationships. After the economic disruption of COVID-19, students need better career education pathways that connect them to stable work. To better target investments around equity, the state could invest in supports that help more students access and complete career education programs--employers and colleges we interviewed cited technology, wage-replacement, and enhanced flexibility as promising areas. Furthermore, pairing supports with more flexibility--particularly for working adults--so they can take full-time course loads could go a long way to improving completion and connecting students more quickly to better jobs. [For the technical appendices, see ED614746.]

These are the technical appendices for the report, "Supporting Student Parents in Community College CalWORKs Programs." The appendices include: (1) CalWORKs and EOPS Programs at California Community Colleges; (2) Survey of Program Directors; (3) Survey Instrument; (4) Survey Summary Statistics; and (5) Analysis of CalWORKs Students. [This report was written with research support from Emily Morton. For the full report, see ED611525.]

This report aims to fill the gap in research on English as a Second Language (ESL) programs at California's community colleges and the effectiveness of reforms aimed at improving student success. A number of colleges have implemented curricular reforms in recent years--accelerating coursework, integrating skills courses, and the like. These reforms are likely to become more widespread in the wake of Assembly Bill (AB) 705, signed into law in 2017. In addition to mandating that community colleges amend how students are placed in remedial courses, AB 705 requires that credit ESL sequences--which offer credit-bearing courses for which students pay tuition--maximize the probability that students enter and complete transfer-level English coursework within three years. Our research suggests that while many colleges are moving in the right direction, more could be done. Specifically, this study finds that: (1) Most degree-seeking ESL students do not successfully complete transfer-level English; (2) Nearly half of colleges offer no more than five levels of ES; (3) Colleges have made great strides in moving away from a traditional approach; (4) Many colleges offer ESL courses; and (5) Many colleges still offer ESL sequences. [This report was written with research support from Sergio Sanchez and Stephanie Pulles. For the accompanying Technical Appendices, see ED598070.]

California's community colleges are in the midst of numerous reforms to improve developmental (also known as remedial or basic skills) education. Developmental education is supposed to help prepare students for college work, but it has long been an obstacle to student success: most students in developmental courses never go on to complete a college-level course in English or math. In this report, the authors focus on reforms to developmental English pathways at California's community colleges. They examine different approaches to reform and their prevalence, and present new evidence on the effectiveness of one of the most common reforms, one-semester acceleration. They find that: (1) The structure and length of developmental English pathways vary considerably; (2) One-semester acceleration substantially shortens the typical developmental pathway; (3) Students who take one-semester acceleration have better outcomes; (4) Despite improvements, most students in accelerated courses do not complete college composition; and (5) Equity gaps remain large for underrepresented students.

The goal of developmental education (also known as remedial or basic skills education) is to help students acquire the skills they need to be successful in college courses, but its track record is poor. In fact, it is one of the largest impediments to student success in California's community colleges. Many students do need additional work to be ready for college, particularly in math. In this report, a follow-up to the authors' earlier statistical portrait of developmental education, they analyze two new reforms in developmental math, known as statistics pathways and compressed math pathways. Both approaches aim to reduce the amount of time students spend in developmental math by reducing the amount of coursework and eliminating exit points--transitions where students are likely to leave the developmental sequence due to failure to re-enroll in the next course in the sequence. Statistics pathways also aim to create an alternative non-algebra based sequence for students in majors that only require statistics (art, sociology, English, journalism, psychology, and other liberal arts and humanities fields). In comparing outcomes for students in these two approaches to those for students in traditional developmental pathways, the authors find that: (1) Outcomes are substantially better for students in the statistics pathway; (2) Outcomes for students in the compressed algebra pathway are somewhat better; (3) All student groups--including underrepresented students--have better outcomes in the statistics and compressed algebra pathways; and (4) The lowest levels of developmental math do not work.