Resource Archive

Suppose postsecondary spaces, campuses, curricula, and classrooms (hybrid, virtual, or traditional) are deeply held as bastions of opportunity, growth, and pipelines to economic growth in and for our communities. In that case, we must examine the message of the late bell hooks. How do we facilitate welcome? How have we established ourselves as a place…

You don’t know the courage it took for your adult students to get into that room, or just to show up virtually, to that classroom. So, try to meet them where they are. See the obstacles that they’ve already overcome. See their goals as strengths. You can turn those strengths from life into strengths in…

Knocking at the College Door: Projections of High School Graduates has been an important resource for policymakers, decision-makers, researchers, and planners in education and workforce development since the first edition was produced in 1979. The 11th edition includes this comprehensive report and interactive data visualizations.

Culturally Sustaining Processes involve a range of practices that acknowledge the different lived experiences of marginalized populations. Historically underrepresented populations may include low-income students, first-generation students, adult learners, students of color, and women in STEM, with students often having intersecting identities that include more than one category of marginalization.

In the wake of multiple pandemics (including COVID-19 and racial injustice), community college leaders have increasingly sought to be forward-leaning on issues of equity, reflecting a significant step forward in advancing social justice. However, prominent and frequently used frames and approaches, like anti-racist frameworks, may ultimately fall short of producing the type of leadership necessary…

Lumina Foundation believes communication has the power to amplify its work by building awareness and deepening understanding of our strategies. The foundation’s communications team wants to aid our partners in sharing lessons from projects.

The Pell Institute has released its latest report,  Is College Worth It?: Black, Latinx, and Indigenous Student Voices on the Value of Postsecondary Credentials.

These are pathways which reflect explicit race conscious policies, programs, and practices that actively address racial inequities to ensure student access and success and engage at an individual, system, and structural level to interrogate and ameliorate inequitable experiences and outcomes.

This brief explores how partnerships and collaboration, on and off university campuses, can motivate cultural, structural, and programmatic change to better serve adult learners of color. It draws insights from a study of the Partnerships for Adult Learner Success (PALS) initiative and includes staff members’ and students’ perspectives and experiences at the eight urban-serving universities…

This brief shares student perspectives on making application decisions, financing college, and choosing to attend their particular institution, helping leaders to understand students’ enrollment decisions and address challenges to postsecondary access.

Helping more Americans earn bachelor’s degrees that position them for further learning and successful careers is essential to a thriving society. However, the COVID-19 pandemic, shifting testing policies and historic legal rulings have significantly disrupted college admissions and enrollment over the past several years. While Americans overwhelmingly understand and value the importance of a college…

The Free Application for Federal Student Aid is the entry ramp to federal grants and loans that many students depend on to afford college. Congress passed the FAFSA Simplification Act in 2020 in part to make it easier to apply for federal aid. However, the rollout of the new FAFSA has suffered from numerous challenges…

Listening to Learners 2024 links student perspectives on learning and support to institution-level practices and technologies. Connecting institutional and student perspectives enables stakeholders and partners to explore their impact on student success, access and equity, and overall institutional satisfaction.​

Growing registered apprenticeship programs to levels seen in other countries will require significant effort and investment. However, community colleges seem well-positioned as a rare bit of low-hanging fruit: institutions that might act as an accelerator of apprenticeship.

The U.S. Department of Labor hopes to expand registered apprenticeships to new industries and occupations where apprenticeship is not widely used, including healthcare and information technology, as well as to populations typically underrepresented in apprenticeships.

In a new collaborative report with TICAS, researchers from the Higher Education, Race, and the Economy (HERE) Lab at the University of California, Merced offer a policy solution to wealth inequality: a supplemental Wealth-Based Pell Grant to help eliminate racial disparities in student loan borrowing and make debt-free college a reality for many more students.

In the past two decades, the number of adults age 60 or older with student loan debt has grown six-fold, and the amount of debt they carry has multiplied nearly 20 times.

Historically Black Colleges and Universities have been doing more with less for more than 150 years. Despite chronic underfunding, these institutions are engines of economic mobility for historically excluded students. When all variables are held constant, the graduation rate of Black students is 11 percentage points higher at HBCUs than at other colleges and universities.

Policymakers and educators have promoted vocational certificate programs at community colleges as an effective way to meet labor market demands and help individuals leave low-wage work.

This study utilizes data from the ACUE Student Survey, which comprehensively captures information about students’ learning experiences and perceptions of their instructors. Through the analyses of both quantitative ratings and qualitative open-ended responses, this study aims to identify the key factors that shape students’ likelihood of recommending their instructors.