More Essential Than Ever | 031 | A Conversation with Dr. Davis Jenkins
How community colleges can move from access to value, and redesign pathways that truly deliver on economic mobility.
Q&A with Dr. Davis Jenkins, Co-author of
More Essential than Ever: Community College Pathways to Educational and Career Success Harvard Education Press, 2025.
Section 1: Framing the Book
What inspired you to write More Essential Than Ever?
Ten years ago, Redesigning America’s Community Colleges: A Clearer Path to Student Success helped catalyze a movement for guided pathways reform. Since then, hundreds of colleges have redesigned programs and advising to help students choose and complete pathways. Over the past decade, we at CCRC have worked side by side with these colleges—studying their progress, struggles, and successes. We wrote More Essential Than Ever to capture what the field has learned and to chart the next phase: ensuring that the pathways colleges build truly lead to good jobs, further education, and mobility for all students.
What is the core argument you want readers to walk away with?
Removing barriers to completion is necessary but not sufficient. Colleges must design every stage of the student experience—from recruitment to completion—with the end in mind: post-college success. That means aligning programs with living-wage careers and transfer opportunities, engaging students in active, contextualized learning, and providing clear, affordable pathways to completion. Community colleges are not just “access” institutions—they are essential pathways to economic mobility and community prosperity
Section 2: Guided Pathways and Beyond
Many colleges have implemented Guided Pathways. What does your research suggest about what’s working, and what’s missing?
Guided pathways have proven that large-scale redesign is possible and effective. Colleges that have implemented the model at scale have improved early momentum indicators—students earning college credits, completing gateway math and English, and staying enrolled. What’s missing is deeper attention to learning, career outcomes, and equity. Too often, the focus stops at course maps and advising redesign rather than ensuring that programs actually lead to living-wage jobs or efficient transfer pathways. The next phase must connect completion to value and equity.
You emphasize that removing barriers to completion is not enough. Can you expand on what else is required for colleges to deliver real value to students?
Colleges need to start with the end in mind—designing backward from the outcomes students seek. That means partnering continuously with employers and universities to keep programs relevant, embedding work-based learning, and ensuring students develop the problem-solving, communication, and digital-fluency skills that enable long-term success. Guided pathways helped students finish; the next frontier is ensuring what they finish pays off.
Section 3: Insights from the Five Frontiers
You highlight the importance of ensuring post-completion value. How are colleges rethinking program design to better align with living-wage jobs and transfer outcomes?
Leading colleges are convening faculty, employers, and university partners to review every program for post-completion value—looking at wages, transfer outcomes, and equity gaps. They’re replacing generic liberal-arts degrees with clearly mapped pre-major transfer pathways and building applied associate and bachelor’s programs in high-demand fields like health, technology, and advanced manufacturing. These efforts ensure that every program is a pathway to a family-sustaining career and further education.
In terms of teaching and learning, what shifts are needed for students to develop durable skills, like problem-solving and technological fluency, that employers value?
Our research shows that employers increasingly value communication, teamwork, and problem-solving alongside technical expertise. Colleges are responding by making active and contextualized learning the norm in program foundation courses and by expanding experiential learning—internships, research, service learning—to all students, not just those in CTE programs. To create versatile learners, colleges must also become versatile institutions that support faculty-led innovation in teaching.
What’s broken (or outdated) in recruitment and onboarding practices? What have you seen work well?
Traditional onboarding focused on orienting students to college procedures and supports. It assumes that most students come with a clear idea of what they want to achieve and how to navigate college. The most successful colleges are using proactive, engaging approaches that ask about students’ interests and goals, connect them with peers and faculty in fields of study, inspire them through early, meaningful coursework, and plan their path to completion—an approach we call Ask-Connect-Inspire-Plan (ACIP). Colleges using this framework report stronger enrollment and persistence, particularly among first-generation and adult students
What are the most effective advising and scheduling strategies to help students complete on time?
Advising works best when it’s embedded in academic fields and supported by real-time data on student progress. Colleges are moving from “help-when-asked” advising to proactive, case-management systems. At the same time, intentional course scheduling—using three-year program maps, compressed terms, and predictable course rotations—enables students with work and family obligations to stay on track. Community college have very little margin for error—getting bad advice about what to take can throw them off track and be very costly. In the book, we call for designing scheduling for busy working students one of the most important equity strategies.
Dual enrollment is sometimes treated as an add-on. How can it become a more intentional on-ramp to postsecondary success?
Dual enrollment has grown rapidly but is often a set of disconnected “random acts of dual enrollment.” Colleges can make it a powerful equity tool by applying guided-pathways principles—offering dual-enrollment students advising, career exploration, and courses aligned with degree or career pathways. When done well, dual enrollment not only accelerates students into college programs but also broadens access for first-generation, rural, and low-income students
Section 4: Organizational Culture and Systems Change
What examples stood out to you of colleges that successfully reorganized for improved culture and outcomes?
We highlight colleges such as Lorain County Community College, Alamo Colleges, and South Puget Sound Community College, which have built cross-functional “inquiry and action” teams that continuously use data to improve programs and teaching. These colleges embed improvement in their daily operations rather than treating reform as an add-on project. They’ve shown that creating a culture of shared responsibility for student learning yields measurable gains in success and equity.
Why is rethinking college finance and resource allocation so critical to sustaining reform?
Sustaining reform requires aligning budgets with student success priorities. Colleges that have succeeded in institutionalizing guided pathways budget annually around a small number of improvement goals, link those to metrics, and invest in advising, teaching, and data capacity. Without tying dollars to strategy, even the best reforms fade when leadership changes
Many colleges struggle with initiative fatigue. What does it take to move from pilot projects to institution-wide transformation?
The key is coherence. Rather than adding initiatives, successful colleges integrate them into a single, college-wide student success strategy. They use strategic plans and annual operational plans and budgets to set a few measurable goals, connect them to budgeting, and communicate relentlessly about progress. Leadership continuity and broad faculty and staff engagement turn “initiative fatigue” into continuous improvement
Section 5: State-Level Leadership
How can state systems better support colleges to adopt and sustain these reforms?
States can play a powerful role by providing sustained coaching, professional learning communities, and modest but flexible funding tied to outcomes, not compliance. The most effective state systems—such as those in Tennessee—offer data tools and technical assistance that help colleges learn from one another while allowing local flexibility in implementation
What incentives (or policy changes) are most urgently needed at the state level?
To sustain large-scale transformation, state policies must go beyond one-time grants and create durable funding structures that reward colleges for improving student outcomes and post-completion value. As we note in More Essential Than Ever, the next frontiers of reform—aligning programs with living-wage jobs, expanding high-quality teaching and learning, strengthening recruitment and onboarding, and scaling equitable dual enrollment—require ongoing investment in staffing, professional development, data systems, and employer and university partnerships. These are systemic, not episodic, costs.
Colleges have often relied on short-term grants and internal reallocations to launch guided pathways, but that approach is not sustainable. States can help by establishing “funding for transformation” mechanisms that (1) provide predictable, multi-year support for colleges that meet clear improvement goals in student progress, completion, and post-completion outcomes; (2) fund shared infrastructure—such as regional technical assistance centers, leadership academies, and data tools—that enable colleges to continuously improve; and (3) build flexibility into funding formulas so that colleges can invest in advising, outreach, and faculty development central to long-term student success.
In the book we feature recent efforts by Texas and North Carolina to rethink community college funding in ways that provide base support to sustain college operations together with strong financial incentives to colleges to deliver programs and credentials of value for students and return on investment for taxpayers.
Section 6: Looking Ahead
If a college leader is just getting started, what’s the one or two actions you would recommend they take right away?
Start by asking two questions:
1) How can we help incoming students (including those in high school dual enrollment) explore interests, connect with people and programs in fields of interest, choose a direction and develop an individualized education program plan?
2) How can we support faculty to engage students —especially new and underserved ones—in purposeful, inspiring learning experiences from day one?
Then organize cross-functional teams to act on those questions and track progress. Building momentum around a shared vision of value is more powerful than launching another initiative.
What gives you hope, even in the face of enrollment challenges and political pressures on higher ed?
Despite enrollment challenges and political headwinds, I’m inspired by the commitment of community-college educators who are doubling down on improving teaching, learning, and program value. Across the country, we’ve seen faculty and staff working together to redesign programs and pedagogy so that every student—regardless of background—can achieve upward mobility. That spirit of mission-driven innovation is why community colleges remain, as our title suggests, more essential than ever.
Resource: Download the discussion guide
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Onward…
Dr. Al Solano
Founder, Continuous Learning Institute | About
Host, Student Success Podcast
A meaningful test of success is how helpful we are in contributing to our fellow human being’s happiness.