This report discusses how more than 30 California colleges implemented Career Advancement Academies (CAAs) to reach and serve underrepresented students in higher education.
We focused on the ways the CAAs addressed critical concerns that community college students had identified in our earlier research. Students’ concerns centered on choosing a major and courses, finding supports and getting specialized support, and finding community on campus. Organizing the current research this way revealed four broad areas where colleges can apply the lessons from the CAAs to their Guided Pathways reforms:
- Colleges can more actively recruit students who may not consider college feasible or feel confident about being college students.
- Colleges can offer students guidance in choosing a major and understanding its connection to careers, and they can clarify the sequencing and availability of their courses.
- Colleges can improve awareness of support services, offer integrated and proactive counseling services, and align counselors with academic specialties.
- Colleges can more actively foster a sense of community and peer-to-peer support – among faculty and staff, as well as among students.
