Degree/Diploma/Certificate

This toolkit provides a guide for creating and implementing work-based learning projects aimed at formalizing and rewarding learning that takes place in the workplace. Through work-based learning projects, students can earn academic credit or industry credentials once they master a set of competencies. The tools and resources included in the toolkit are focused on four stages of implementing the projects: planning, designing, doing, and sustaining. 

This report highlights quasi-experimental and experimental research on promising approaches for increasing dropouts’ rate of GED attainment, other high school equivalency credentials, and successful transition to college. The report divides these interventions into three categories: college and career ready standards and curricula, GED-to-college “bridge” programs, and dual enrollment.

This guide details how colleges can access and effectively use labor market data to maximize employment for their graduates. The guide inventories available data sources, describes how postsecondary institutions can best apply labor market data, and recommends what colleges can do to improve labor market data use and access. The examples provided come from community colleges, but are also relevant to four-year colleges and their graduates.

This brief argues that California and many other states have the foundations in place to build better accountability systems, and proposes a three-pronged approach to put California back on the path of national leadership.

Using Oklahoma as a case study, this article provides analysis of what happens to students after high school graduation.

This series of essays explores the challenges of implementing so many education reforms—such as new Common Core standards, new assessments, new accountability systems, new teacher evaluations, new data systems, and for some states, Race to the Top—all at once, provides a framework for policymakers to think about the choices ahead, as well as strategies and solutions to unexpected conflicts.

This report examines the graduation rates across the nation's colleges and universities, using data from the U.S. Department of Education. Institutions with highest and lowest graduation rates are included and the differences between these institutions are discussed. The report finds that there is great variability among graduation rates, even among institutions that have similar admission standards and admit students with similar backgrounds. 

This report describes a measure created by Education Sector, the "borrowing to credential ratio", which calculates the total amount of money borrowed by undergraduates at a college divided by the sum of total number of degrees awarded by that college. The borrowing to credential ratio was calculated using data from 2006-07, 2007-08, and 2008-09. Key results include: the ratio has risen sharply in recent years, ratios at for-profits are higher than elsewhere, and there is a wide variation in ratios among states and elite colleges.