This Lumina Foundation issue paper looks at how community colleges are moving towards emphasizing workforce education for underserved populations and ways that colleges build partnerships with employers. The issue paper also looks at the adoption of shorter, stackable credentials and the value of credentials in the labor market as workers enter and progress through career pathways.

ASCEND at the Aspen Institute will host a webinar on August 28, 2019 from 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. ET to discuss the implementation of the Restoring Education and Learning (REAL) Act. The REAL Act restores Pell Grant eligibility for incarcerated individuals, so that they can pursue postsecondary education. ASCEND representatives will moderate this webinar, which will feature presentations by representatives from the College and Community Fellowship, Vera Institute of Justice, and New York City Housing Authority.

This Committee for Economic Development report reviews three tools that address increasing pathways for employment for individuals who do not earn a bachelor’s degree. These tools include models for career navigation and improved career counseling, expansion of apprenticeship programs, and the increased use of competency-based hiring and assessment, rather than relying solely on levels of educational attainment.

This Vera Institute of Justice report is an evaluation of the Institute’s five-year demonstration project that reviewed postsecondary education programs for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated persons. This project supported colleges and state corrections agencies in Michigan, New Jersey, and North Carolina in offering programs in prison and designing reentry programs for further education. The report illustrates the project design and its implementation, while including findings from interviews with program partners and former students.

This American Enterprise Institute report looks at noncredit skills training as a potential approach for addressing the skills gap in various occupations and how industry-based certification from noncredit training can address the demand for qualified labor. The report provides models of noncredit programs used at community colleges nationally and can be operationalized more flexibly than traditional degree programs.

This Jobs for the Future report identifies how rural community colleges offer academic and non-academic support for adult and non-traditional learners’ college retention and completion. While important for all first-generation students and adult learners, these supports are typically less available within rural communities as a result of distance and fewer institutional resources.

This Jobs for the Future report profiles the Opportunity Works program, a national effort to create postsecondary education and career pathways for over 2,000 out-of-school and out-of-work youth. The research in this report identifies four strategies for program success: place community-based organizations at the center, locate the “sweet spot” of a guiding model, provide excellent programming, and plan for program sustainability from the beginning.

This Jobs for the Future research report describes how short-term apprenticeship programs can be integrated into a full career ladder. It identifies how shorter apprenticeships (18 months or less) might represent stackable rungs on the career ladder, compared to more traditional apprenticeship programs that are longer in length. The report includes recommendations for employers as well as government to support expanding stackable apprenticeships.

This Center for Law and Social Policy issue brief describes how career pathways have a shared definition under Perkins V, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, and the Higher Education Act. The relationship between career pathways and programs of study is discussed; this important relationship ties training and education to meet the needs of learners as they seek to enter and advance in jobs that require credentialing.

This Annie E. Casey Foundation-supported study, authored by Brookings and Child Trends, identifies three factors that contribute to future economic progress among low-income youth: a post-secondary education (potentially equalizes young adults searching for high-quality jobs), labor market experience at an early age (predicts higher wages and job quality later in life), and relevant high school work-based learning experiences (involve positive relationships with adults and have a positive effect on job quality).