An overview of three essential components of transition strategies
Connection
What connection means: K-12 schools and districts, community colleges, four-year institutions, employers, and community organizations connect through collective work focused on student success.
Questions to consider: How can we better serve students by better understanding one another’s work as instructors, counselors, and support staff? How might we address challenges together?
Goal: Colleges clearly understand how collaborative transition strategies, including dual enrollment, fit within a Guided Pathways framework, strengthen student success, and pursue equity.
Intentional Design
What intentional design means: Serving students with pathways based on local needs that include scaffolded supports, clear milestones, and multiple onramps and off-ramps.
Questions to consider: How do we choose a pathway to develop? How do we ensure we are serving students who might not otherwise consider college, or who have been underserved?
Goal: Colleges critically analyze transition data to continually improve the quality and effectiveness of programs to calibrate needs and identify gaps in student success.
Sustainability
What sustainability means: Embedding thoughtful partnerships at the core of our institutions by creating new cultural norms and structures to support them.
Questions to consider: How can we do our everyday work to include our partners? How do we keep students at the center of all of our work?
Goal: More underrepresented students attain their goals, and gaps shrink in achievement, completion, and other measures by race, income and other characteristics.