Central to philanthropy at the intersection of workforce development and postsecondary education, community colleges serve first-generation learners, adult workers seeking to upskill, and young people navigating the transition from high school to career.
In the second meeting of Workforce Matters’ Postsecondary + Workforce Funders Affinity Group, we invited researchers John Fink and Hana Lahr from the Community College Research Center (CCRC) to share about their research on improving student outcomes beyond completion, focusing on what students are completing — and where it leads.
What the Data Reveal
Walk into most community colleges and you’ll find a murky enrollment picture. Roughly a fifth of community college students nationally are high school students enrolled through dual enrollment. Beyond that, large swaths of students sit in general studies, pre-health, pre-nursing, and other loosely defined tracks — what Fink calls the “gray buckets.” These are programs where the path forward is unclear and students often can’t see how their coursework connects to their goals.
This has serious consequences for retention. Community colleges lose nearly half their students between the first and second fall — not to transfer or completion, but to full departure from higher education. The CCRC researchers hypothesize a key driver: students who can’t see where they’re going are far more likely to stop going altogether.
For funders, this reframes the due diligence question. It’s not enough to ask whether interventions are helping to move completion rates. More useful questions are: completion of what? Into what? For whom?
Frontiers Worth Funding
Fink and Lahr identify several reform areas where investment can drive meaningful change in student outcomes. These – and other – next frontiers of community college innovation are detailed in CCRC’s new book, More Essential Than Ever: Community College Pathways to College and Career Success:
Program design and employer engagement. Substantive, ongoing employer engagement – and rethinking the role and responsibility of advisory boards – can result in stronger program review processes and program redesign efforts, including updates to the curriculum and the addition of work-based learning. These actions can improve post-completion employment prospects and earnings for students.
Funder question: Is the college in active, curriculum-shaping dialogue with local employers? In what ways do the college, and program faculty, work with employers to update curriculum, revise course content, and develop new programs to ensure that they are preparing students for good jobs in their region?
Program enrollment clarity. Colleges track enrollment numbers, but rarely ask enrollment in what? Disaggregating data by program and demographics reveals equity gaps — and can prompt real policy change, by encouraging colleges to consider how students are ending up selecting different programs of study.
Funder question: Does the college or intermediary you’re considering track not just how many students enroll and complete, but which programs they’re in — and whether those programs lead to living-wage employment or a viable transfer path?
Onboarding redesign. Most college onboarding is transactional and often rushed – especially during the lead up to the beginning of the fall term. Leading colleges are replacing typical intake questions like “workforce or transfer?” with genuine conversations about student goals, connecting learners to aligned programs and helping them to develop an educational plan for meeting their goals from day one.
Funder question: How does the college help students explore programs and careers, make an initial program choice, and develop an educational plan — and how can the college ensure that every new student, whether they are in transfer, workforce, or dual enrollment, has this experience?
Individualized educational planning. Too many students don’t know what courses to take next, when they’ll graduate, or what it will cost. Every student needs a living educational plan, and colleges should be asking not “are you full-time or part-time?” but “are you on your plan, or do we need to update your plan?”
Funder question: Does the organization you’re funding have a clear mechanism to help students make educational plans, track whether individual students are progressing toward their goals — and intervene when they’re not?
Experiential learning at scale. Employers consistently prioritize communication, critical thinking, and teamwork, and these skills are best developed through hands-on learning. As Lahr observed, scaling this requires embedding work-based learning into all programs of study, including transfer programs.
Funder question: How is experiential learning structured and tracked — and does it reach students at scale, or only a select few in programs where it’s required for program completion?
More purposeful dual enrollment. As mentioned above, dual enrollment already operates on a large scale – nearly 3 million students served in 80% of public high schools annually, but there are gaps in access and lack of alignment to postsecondary degrees. Making dual enrollment a default part of high school CTE programs and better incentivizing students — particularly those who might not otherwise have gone to college– to continue in postsecondary after high school by making the “why” clearer to them, also provides an opportunity to improve student outcomes.
Funder question: Who is enrolled in dual enrollment programs, and how are students advised about how their credits connect to post-graduation career and education goals?
Additional Philanthropic Investment Opportunities
Regional intermediaries — nonprofits that serve as neutral conveners across K-12, community colleges, and employers — are critical in communities where institutional silos block collaboration. They depend on local and regional philanthropy to sustain the table and keep cross-sector relationships alive.
State-based technical assistance networks, like the Student Success Centers model, offer a way to reach all colleges in a state — including often under-resourced rural institutions — through shared professional development and coordinated reform efforts, providing a way for best practices to scale.
Funder question: Are your investments building durable institutional capacity — or funding a program that ends when the grant does?
In addition, it is worth reiterating that multi-year, structured support produces more lasting change than one-time project grants. For funders committed to improving economic mobility and equity in partnership with community colleges, there is real opportunity to invest in and improve navigation, onboarding, employer engagement, experiential learning, and individualized support at the institutional and system levels.
If you are a funder investing at the intersection of workforce development and postsecondary education and want to join our next conversation, please read more and register here.
You can find more about the book and CCRC’s research referenced above (including a blog series, and a discussion guide) here.
