Excerpted with permission from the new book Who Needs College Anymore? Imagining a Future Where Degrees Won’t Matter by Kathleen deLaski, February 2025, published by Harvard Education Press. deLaski, founder and board chair of Education Lab Design, which works with colleges to better align their institutions with the world of work. The following comes from a chapter exploring various innovative models that weave college and work experience, in this case, micro-pathways at community colleges. (Editor’s note: some slight edits have been made for style purposes.)
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After my first five years working on college redesign models, I became convinced that community colleges are the place to start, for one reason: leaders of community colleges faced more of an existential crisis than four-year universities as their enrollment numbers fell harder over the past decade, so they were open to new ideas.
Community college enrollment has fallen 37% since 2010, by nearly 2.6 million. And the data were telling colleges that more students wanted career-focused, shorter-term programs. While four-year universities have an average attrition rate of 25% after the first year, at two-year colleges, it’s almost twice that bad, which suggests the old degree model is not meeting enough of them where they are. If anything can save these colleges, numbers show that it is probably shorter-term certificates, which are gaining in popularity at many community colleges. (The other fast-growing offering at community colleges is dual enrollment, when high school students take college classes.)
Abigail’s journey
Abigail, a nineteen-year-old from Tucson, Arizona, was one among the missing millions. She told her adviser that she always felt like she “struggled with school, even though she never struggled.” After high school, she tried a few classes at Pima, the local community college in Tucson, but things didn’t work out. Pima’s traditional mission had been to help students get their associate of arts degree and hopefully transfer to the flagship public University of Arizona, in the same city.
Nationally, only 13% of financial aid recipients who start community college get all the way through the four-year degree. Pima’s statistics track with the national averages. To Abigail’s credit, when community college didn’t work out for her, she saw something else on Pima’s website that caught her eye: PimaFastTrack, a certificate to become an emergency medical technician.
Abigail was struck by the 12-week length of this new program and that the $1,500 in tuition would be covered by workforce grants at the college. After she completed the program and passed her National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians certification exam, it took Abigail only a couple of months to secure a position with a local emergency medical services agency.
According to her program mentor, Abigail is now considering the next step on the stepladder of micro-pathways, the higher-paying paramedic and firefighter program and certification. And while her initial certification program doesn’t earn her college credit now, it will count for 9.5 credits if and when she enters the college’s paramedic or nursing degree program.
A wave of interest
Ian Roark, senior vice president of workforce training at Pima, says he was surprised when the website first went up introducing six micro-pathways, ranging from healthcare technology to automotive technology. The college wasn’t ready to handle the demand and learned that it needed to move to monthly rolling start times, which is not typical for colleges.
“When we did our first marketing campaign, in the first month, we had 1,000 people reach out. We’ve never seen a response like that to any other new program,” he recalls.
Ian has been most pleased that the majority of graduates so far, 114 as of publication, are stop-outs, people who are coming back to Pima a second time, to try a new and shorter approach to community college. Another 100 enrollees came from a city partnership with a local homeless shelter.
Influx of micro-pathways
Nationally, the nonprofit Education Design Lab is working with 70 community colleges and state community college systems to implement the micro-pathway, stepladder approach across more than 100 job roles so far. The new programs are called micro-pathways because they are shorter than a two-year degree, fully focused on preparing learners for a particular high-demand role, but providing visibility and credit toward a degree pathway if the learner wants it later on. These roles account for about 30% of job openings nationally, and designing the credential programs with employers is meant to solve the issue that, in many cases, regional employer demand doesn’t match what is being taught or offered.
The micro-pathways are required to include “design criteria” aimed at standardizing quality and return on investment for learners. The criteria range from length of program (a year or less), to industry endorsement of the skills taught, to meaningful job demand at family-sustaining salaries for graduates, and — one that might surprise — to training on soft or durable skills, which regional employers are called on to recommend. Most of the 300 large and small employer partners have chosen a “critical thinking” credential to add to the pathway. “Collaboration” is the second most popular. For Abigail’s EMT certification, the employers chose “intercultural competency.”
Where do micro-pathways fit on the “experience-first” continuum? To be honest, most colleges in the first cohort didn’t start out in 2020 thinking about building experience into the pathways — instead, they were responding to the freefall in degree applicants and strong interest in certificates. But as the micro-pathway model evolves, work-based experience has become a goal because employers are asking for it, and so are learners.
“These work-based learning experiences provide a safety net for community college learners,” says Lisa Larson, senior vice president of the Education Design Lab. “They give learners an opportunity to work with an employer in a way that’s less risky than going out and looking for that first job.”
Waiting for data findings
Colleges are creating micro-pathways with on-the-job training for roles, ranging from construction management in Seattle, to healthcare administration in Montana. Lisa says that Toyota is weaving students into the workflow, building a work schedule around their school schedule, to train next-generation auto mechanics in Idaho.
All of these paths are being or will be offered as paid work-and-learn experiences at the community college and on-site at the company. This is not so far off from the fully integrated model I said was near impossible at the beginning of this chapter, but the numbers so far are very small.
What the colleges don’t have yet, as these pilots and programs start up in different variations around the country, is clear data on how well the pathways set learners up for a professional career trajectory. This is why I am still unwilling to state that there are surefire pathways to professional success outside the degree.
Not that college is surefire either. As we will see in the next chapter, the debt-versus-degree trade-off has paid off less and less over time for all groups of college goers. But do these micro-pathways set learners up for lifelong learning, for a stepladder approach to building agile career paths with work-ready milestones? We don’t know yet. Remember, these are mostly “noncredit” learners. Their journeys were not tracked. Now, with all the interest from consumers and employers, the data infrastructure is being put in place.
As this book is being written, Congress is considering landmark legislation that would extend federal financial aid to noncredit micro-pathways like these, if they show hiring results and economic gains for students. While Pima has figured out how to cobble together workforce grants to fund short-termers like Abigail, it’s not typical that colleges can find grants to fund their noncredit students, and it’s not typical that employers are stepping up. The out-of-pocket cost is certainly suppressing enrollment for short-term programs, according to my conversations with several community colleges. And congressional action could change that dramatically.
