Assessing College-Credit-in-High-School Programs as On-Ramps to Career Pathways for Underrepresented Students

April 28, 2023
Each year, millions of high school students take courses and exams to earn college credit and thus get a jump start on college while also satisfying requirements for high school graduation. Although the strength of the evidence varies by program type, evaluation research indicates that earning college credit through common early college credit programs increases…

Honoring Indigenous Ways of Knowing in Community College Programs

April 4, 2023
In 2019, Native communities in northern rural Wisconsin and Nicolet Area Technical College (Nicolet College) embarked on a plan to establish pathways to postsecondary education for Indigenous learners. The goal was to create a curriculum and grant credit for prior knowledge in Native culture, governance, history, and language toward a technical certificate and associate degree.…
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Race-Conscious Affirmative Action

March 20, 2023
An expected national ban on the consideration of race in college admissions will threaten the racial and ethnic diversity of students at selective colleges unless these colleges fundamentally alter their admissions practices. Race-Conscious Affirmative Action: What’s Next finds that selective colleges barred from considering race and ethnicity in their admissions decisions may be able to…

Higher Education Access and Success for Undocumented Students Start With Nine Key Criteria

Feb. 20, 2023
The United States is home to more than 400,000 undocumented students in higher education, including 181,000 recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. This means that one out of every 50 students in college is undocumented. Unlike other college students, however, undocumented students must often navigate complex rules and regulations to access a…

#SOMOSNC: Findings and Recommendations to Support Latinx Education in North Carolina

Feb. 13, 2023
North Carolina’s public education system is at a crossroads. Currently, lawmakers continue a decades-long debate over meeting their constitutional obligations of funding public education in the state. Other education stakeholders, led by MyFutureNC, are working to uplift the state’s workforce by ensuring that two million North Carolinians have a postsecondary degree by 2030.

Diversity and STEM

Jan. 30, 2023
A diverse workforce provides the potential for innovation by leveraging different backgrounds, experiences, and points of view. Innovation and creativity, along with technical skills relying on expertise in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), contribute to a robust STEM enterprise. Furthermore, STEM workers have higher median earnings and lower rates of unemployment compared with non-STEM…

The Next Phase of Placement Reform: Moving Toward Equity-Centered Practice

Aug. 17, 2022
Test-only placement systems are associated with inaccurate placement determinations that can perpetuate college achievement gaps by race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status. In response, colleges across the country are increasingly experimenting with and adopting alternative placement strategies that reduce the number of students assigned to prerequisite developmental education and increase access to college-level courses.
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Greater Funding, Greater Needs

July 8, 2022
Historically Black colleges and universities have distinguished themselves over the past two years in the face of uncertainty and difficulty. They innovated to embrace remote learning and redirected funds to provide their students with much-needed support. And they received an outpouring of funding: The federal government has allocated more than $6.5 billion to HBCUs over…
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Latino Student Success

July 7, 2022
For Latino students—the largest ethnic group in our nation’s schools—the pandemic threatened to undermine decades of steady educational progress. At the same time, many of the inequities in America’s schools that were present before the pandemic remain. For example, Latino students are less likely to attend a high-performing school than non-Latino white students, and Latinos…

Resilient But Deeper in Student Debt: Women of Color Faced Greater Hardships Through COVID-19

June 28, 2022
Women carry about two-thirds of the $1.7 trillion of federal student debt, with Black women more than twice as likely as white men to owe more than $50,000 in undergraduate student loan debt. The COVID-19 crisis has only exacerbated the financially unstable positions of many women, according to a new report from the Center for…
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The Equation for Equality

March 22, 2022
As the tech industry continues to see a high demand for positions while also being plagued with skill shortages, a report from Emsi Burning Glass says women of color must be part of the conversation or be in consideration for these roles—especially with so many still looking for work and with many more already using…