Community College Career Education

Scaling a New Approach

A new landscape is emerging at community colleges across the country – a new approach that puts preparing students for the workforce at the center of the college’s mission and culture.

Learning Frameworks

Tools for Building a Better Educational Experience

Learning frameworks define what an individual learner can do by detailing the application of knowledge in various contexts—education, military, and employment. This paper outlines the roles that learning frameworks play in the emerging ecosystem of connected learning—why they matter and how they can bring disparate pieces of the learning ecosystem together for greater portability and documentation of learning in all the places it unfolds. The paper concludes with a focus on technological innovations as a source of future directions for learning frameworks connectivity.

Moving From the Legacy Student Hour Toward a Comprehensive Measure of Student Learning

Examining Benefits of a Competency-Based Taxonomy of Learning

This publication examines current challenges with the articulation of learning and argues that a new means of articulating learning is necessary. Specifically, drawbacks and inefficiencies developed to accommodate the credit hour measure of student learning are examined. As an alternative, a new competency-based measure of learning is proposed.

Quality Assurance and Improvement in Higher Education

The Role of the States

States play a fundamental role in higher education, protecting both the investment of state dollars and their citizens as their consumers. Despite this central responsibility, many states struggle with how they might help ensure students are receiving a quality educational experience.

Talent, Innovation, and Equity (TIE) States

One pager on being a Lumina TIE state

Strategy Labs, Lumina Foundation’s platform for supporting state policy and leadership to increase postsecondary attainment, has expanded its suite of services to recognize and facilitate progress in committed states—referred to as the Talent, Innovation and Equity (TIE) States—that have demonstrated a commitment to improve higher education attainment for students of color. As its Strategic Plan for 2017- 2020 states, Lumina Foundation “recognizes that the 2025 goal will remain out of reach unless postsecondary attainment among African-Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians increases significantly.”

Focus Magazine, Summer 2019: Cutting-edge-ucators

Dedicated disrupters find innovative ways to offer college-level learning

America’s most agile, innovative, and entrepreneurial minds are working to redefine “college” and create new ways to deliver vital learning to millions more Americans. This issue of Focus magazine will introduce you to just a few of these educational innovators.

The Learner Revolution: How Colleges Can Thrive in a New Skills and Competencies Marketplace

Reflections from five years of applied human-centered design at 100+ institutions

Higher education is in the throes of a learner revolution that will fundamentally change the way students and institutions interact. Work-relevant skills and competencies should be at the center of institutional leaders’ plans as they strive to meet students’ expectations, says this report. The report includes five models that traditional institutions can use to meet the changing demands of today’s learners.

Federal Policy Priorities

Lumina's statement of federal policy priorities

Proposal for protecting and empowering students and borrowers of color

A letter from Lumina's Federal Policy team in response to a request from U.S. Senators

Actions the federal government can take to address disparities in borrower outcomes and make higher education equitable for all.

Who is Today's Student?

Today’s student is struggling to navigate an outdated system

When thinking of typical college students, most of us envision 18- to-21- year-olds fresh out of high school taking classes full-time on a sprawling campus. That is no longer true: full-time, 18- to 21-year-old students now make up just a third of the college population. Today’s students represent a new reality.