Guided Pathways redesign

Career Ladders Project supports the inquiry, design, implementation, and assessment of Guided Pathways in California community colleges. To build capacity for evidence-based institutional redesign, focused on equity, we collaborate with colleges to understand their structures and goals, redesign systems, and implement change.

We created a Guided Pathways Inquiry Guide to help jumpstart redesign. Released in fall 2020, the Design Guide for Integrating Student Supports provides information and strategies to redesign key areas of the student’s journey–onboarding, the first year, and counseling.

Here are examples of how individual colleges have redesigned their structures and practices:

The Examples of GP Redesign were produced by Career Ladders Project with funding from the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office.

For more tools — including our GP Stories — check our “Tools for the Field” page.

GP Stories are brief narratives of how some colleges have approached designing curriculum; including student voices in redesign; integrating student supports; aligning redesign across campus; using data; managing redesign; and mapping.

Other tools include guides for mapping career pathways; putting on a Learning Cluster webinar; and researching other colleges’ reform efforts through a Site Exchange; and much more.

Here is additional information on specific challenges in Guided Pathways redesign.

Redesigning and integrating student supports

Mapping programs and meta-majors

Including student voices in Guided Pathways redesign

Using data in Guided Pathways redesign

What are Guided Pathways?

Colleges nationwide are integrating related certificates and degrees together with aligned academic and social supports to create more coherent programs of study – frequently called guided pathways – that anticipate the demands of employment, support college persistence (students staying in school), and ensure that students have support in reaching their educational goals. In this approach, instruction and support services are aligned and designed to help all students to take the following steps:

Explore and clarify their career and educational goals
Choose pathways that will help them achieve their goals
Persist in college
Acquire knowledge and skills that advance their education and skills