The College and Career Readines and Success Center closed on September 30,2019 because the grant cycle for the U.S. Department of Education Comprehensive Centers ended. The information on this website will no longer be updated. Visit www.air.org for updates on college and career readiness.
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No matter what side you’re on in the battle over standards, testing, school choice, or teacher tenure, everybody agrees that kids must leave high school ready for college and careers. State leaders are giving this commitment a lot of thought and are working to define what “college and career ready” means for their students.
This brief discusses the extent to which a lack of sufficient employment skills leads to structural unemployment throughout the country. In doing so, it also attempts to understand why, in a nation full of countless education resources, this “employment skill gap” persists.
This report discusses the outcomes of a longitudinal study, conducted to investigate the profile of low-skill adults entering community or technical colleges in Washington State and to identify the points at which this demographic commonly drops out or fails to achieve. The study findings indicate that technical and community colleges should establish goals for low-skill adults to earn a credential and take a year’s worth of college-level courses to improve opportunities for achievement via college entry or career-path employment.
This report reveals the components of a successful collaboration by sharing the collaborative model of the Long Beach Seamless Education Partnership. The Partnership is comprised of faculty, administrators, and non-education institutional leaders dedicated to the successful transition of students from secondary school to college and the workforce. The components of the Partnership’s P-20 collaboration model include strong leadership, media involvement, initiatives that thrive in spite of turnover, and a community demand for improvement.
In this report, the State High Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) shares five processes that are key to the development of effective and sustainable state longitudinal data systems. These components were identified by a cohort of 11 state leadership teams and content experts collaborating to provide a framework for states in the early stages of creating longitudinal data systems.
This report explores how competency-based education at institutions of higher learning has taken on greater prominence in recent years as several colleges and universities have adopted degree programs. Rather than relying on course credit accumulation, competency-based programs require the demonstration of knowledge for degree progression. In these programs, degree completion is dependent on the demonstration of content mastery rather than fulfilling a predetermined amount of time in a sequence of courses.
This report explores how institutions of higher education are borrowing from business and government “shared service” models to control costs and deliver higher operational efficiency. The report examines the key differences between postsecondary institutions and the private-sector companies that use a shared service model and details the principles behind the model.
While apprenticeships are offered throughout the nation, programs use different measures to indicate successful completion and mastery of the relevant skills learned. This Center for American Progress (CAP) policy brief outlines the benefits of apprenticeships, describes why current apprenticeships are not meeting student and employer needs, and advocates that to address this problem, apprenticeships must provide a portable, nationally recognized credential.
