The movement to increase community college student success has never been short on ideas. For two decades, hundreds of institutions have reshaped what student progress looks like and the meaning of institutional responsibility. Faculty and administrators have redesigned developmental education, built guided pathways that put students at the center of their institutions, and launched strategies to improve early momentum results so that institutions and students know if they are on track to completion.
These were novel ideas and the changes mattered. With new urgency to address the holistic needs of students inside and outside the classroom, completion rates have improved. Institutional cultures have shifted. And a generation of college leaders now sees student success as the central work of their institutions.
But I believe that the next phase of the student success movement requires something different from innovation by invention. It requires innovation by intention to rethink who community colleges serve and how far into their journeys and into their careers and communities we should serve them, what matters most in program offerings and the classroom, and accelerating the pace of change, not just for student time to degree, but for institutional transformation.
Consider five places where new innovation by intention must show up.
1. A new access agenda
For generations, community colleges have been defined by the promise of open access. The open door has been our moral center and our democratic commitment. But access today must be understood differently than it was when many community colleges were founded.
Too many students remain disconnected from opportunity — not because the door is closed, but because they may never have thought of entering and the entryways are not structured for them to enter and even benefit. Other students enter our colleges but encounter barriers that interrupt their progress before earning a postsecondary degree or credential.
The next access agenda must move beyond traditional approaches to managing the inquiry to admissions process to discover and connect with those we have left behind who need skills and credentials for economic mobility. This will require a new approach to strategic enrollment management. This is important not only for our own sustainability but also for the well-being of our communities. We must ask new questions: Who is missing from our campuses? Which communities are disconnected from higher education? How do we not just deliver services but change public policies about childcare, housing instability, health care access and immigration to shape who can participate?
This moment also demands vigilance. In many ways, access as a concept is under attack. Proposed financial aid restrictions and reductions in public benefits that many students rely on to stay enrolled threaten access and affordability for community college students. The work ahead is not only to expand access but also to defend it.
2. From course and program offerings, to full-blown program portfolios
Over the past decade, colleges have worked hard to improve course completion rates and create clearer program pathways that students can navigate efficiently.
The next challenge is for institutions to think strategically about not just courses and programs, but also their entire program portfolios — the collective mix of offerings that shape a college’s impact on students and communities. Do programs, individually and as a collective, lead to meaningful wage gains and career mobility? Are transfer pathways aligned with regional talent needs and resulting in bachelor’s degree completion? Are new programs emerging in response to evolving workforce needs while older programs are thoughtfully reinvented, modified or reconsidered?
Too often, colleges add programs without revisiting their overall academic offerings, resulting in a confusing array of choices for students and uneven program outcomes. Leadership in the next decade will require presidents and faculty leaders to become portfolio strategists — ensuring that the programs students enter truly have meaning and lead to credentials of value.
For this reason, rather than being overly consumed designing short-term Pell-eligible programs, we must continue to work on important degree programs, transfer pathways that end in bachelor’s degree attainment, and our own new bachelor’s degree programs that all have proven mobility gains for students.
3. Mobility as our North Star
For much of the student success movement, completion has necessarily served as the central metric of progress for community college reform. Completion matters. A credential changes lives.
But completion is not the finish line. The next frontier for community colleges must be mobility. Institutions must understand more clearly how credentials translate into long-term outcomes for students and families: wage progression, career advancement, licensure success, civic participation and broader community prosperity.
The entire field needs to develop shared, transparent mobility metrics which will allow institutions to align programs more intentionally with student goals and community needs — not simply in financial terms but in terms of the broader life opportunities that education creates for learners and their families.
The Community College Research Center’s work to identify and clearly define early momentum metrics helped our field to accelerate progress on completion. Community colleges need the same clarity on defining mobility to help us accelerate post-completion success that also leads to thriving communities.
4. Compress the distance between knowing and doing
Community colleges today possess an extraordinary body of knowledge about what works.
Robust advising systems that get students on the right path and support intervention before students fail increase engagement and improve student persistence, as do creating cultures of belonging and support. Structured pathways reduce confusion and excess credits. But too often, promising reforms remain confined to pilot programs or individual departments, and the shift to wider institutional implementation can stretch for years.
It is time for community colleges to seize this moment and use time as a lever. Just as we work to compress the time to degree for students, it is now time to compress the time to results for institutions. We can no longer accept that it takes colleges five to seven years to design the systems and build the capacities to accelerate outcomes.
Compressing the time between knowing and doing will require new forms of distributed leadership throughout our institutions — faculty, program directors, student services professionals and administrators all empowered to act on evidence and make timely decisions. It will also require institutional cultures that value agility over inertia, experimentation over perfection and learning over compliance.
The question for the future is not simply “What works?” but “How quickly can we act on what we know works?”
5. Teaching and learning at the center
Finally, the student success movement must confront one of its enduring blind spots.
For too long, much of our reform work has focused on structures surrounding learning — advising systems, program maps, scheduling models, financial supports and institutional policies.
Though crucial, these efforts are not substitutes for what happens inside the classroom.
The future of the student success movement will only go as far as our ability to move teaching and learning from the margins of reform to the center of it.
This means investing in evidence-based pedagogy, supporting faculty innovation, integrating learning science into course design, and ensuring that adjunct and full-time faculty alike are fully engaged in institutional transformation. It also means recognizing that the future of teaching will be shaped by emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, which will transform how knowledge is created, shared and assessed.
The work ahead
The challenge of advancing learner success within our colleges and prosperity within our communities is immense. But the next decade does not require us to reinvent our mission. It requires greater intention. The time is now to align leadership, funding and the daily work of institutional and community transformation on the promise of open doors, meaningful opportunity and stronger communities. This is one of the most radical and hopeful commitments in American higher education.
