Postsecondary Learning & Navigation

Navigation and advising

Learners make important decisions at every step of their education—from choosing what to do after high school to selecting courses, paying for college, and staying on track toward a credential. Yet access to guidance is uneven. In high schools with high counselor caseloads—400 or more students per counselor—students receive college advising guidance at lower rates, with potential first-generation college students the least likely to access support. In college, advisors at some under-resourced public institutions support more than 600 students at a time, limiting opportunities for personalized guidance and leaving many learners to navigate complex academic and administrative systems largely on their own.

We work to strengthen advising and navigation so learners can receive clear, timely, and personalized guidance as they make decisions about their future. This includes helping institutions build stronger data and support systems and exploring how new technologies, including AI, can connect fragmented information and make guidance more responsive—while keeping advisors and other trusted adults at the center of the experience.

Digitally enabled teaching & learning

Success in foundational first-year courses can greatly influence whether learners build momentum toward a credential or fall behind. Yet in introductory courses such as calculus, chemistry, and statistics, as many as 30% of learners receive a D or F grade or withdraw.  

Many learners are struggling not because they can’t do the work, but because courses aren’t consistently designed to foster motivation and engagement, and professors aren’t always equipped with the strategies needed to meet the diverse needs of their learners. 

We support the development and adoption of digitally enabled teaching and learning approaches grounded in evidence about how students learn. By combining effective instructional practices with advances in technology, including AI-enabled courseware, these approaches can provide learners with timely feedback and personalized support while giving faculty better information to strengthen instruction and help more students succeed. 

Learning mobility

Learners increasingly move between institutions and in and out of education as they balance school, work, and family. But our postsecondary system does not consistently recognize and apply the credits, skills, and learning they have already earned as they make those transitions. Transfer students lose an average of 43% of previously earned credits, which can mean additional time, cost, and debt on the path to a credential. 

Transfer reform and credit mobility are critical first steps towards a larger vision for learning mobility: the ability of learners to move through education and into the workforce without what they’ve already learned losing value, regardless of where or how that learning happened. That includes work experience, industry credentials, skills-based training, and prior learning of all kinds – all of it assessed, portable, and recognized. 

Our work focuses on strengthening the shared data, tools, and infrastructure that can give learners greater clarity about how their learning will count and help institutions create more transparent and efficient pathways to credentials.

Institutional and system improvement

Effective solutions have a greater impact when colleges and universities have the capacity to adopt them, implement them well, and continuously improve. We work with districts, schools, institutions, and the organizations that support them to strengthen the systems, practices, data, and capabilities needed to improve student outcomes at scale. 

Often done via networks that support collaboration and cross-pollination, this work helps institutions adopt and implement evidence-based approaches to building student momentum, such as dual enrollment and advising, as well as approaches to sustaining that momentum with strong learning, navigation, and credit mobility practices. By building institutional capacity to test and refine new approaches and creating opportunities to learn from evidence and from one another, institutions can make effective practices part of how they operate and extend their benefits to more learners.

Policy

Federal and state policies shape how learners access, move through, and complete postsecondary education—and influence institutions’ ability to adopt and sustain approaches that improve student outcomes. We work to advance policies that create the conditions for more learners to earn credentials of value. Our policy work focuses on using evidence to inform decisions about postsecondary access, affordability, accountability, student success, and the movement of learning and credits across institutions. We also work to ensure that policy and institutional practice reinforce one another so that effective approaches can reach more learners and endure over time.