Transforming the community college’s role requires aligning institutional reform with holistic student support, redefining success by centering the lived realities of today’s diverse learners and linking education to both persistence and economic mobility. In this interview, Yolanda Watson Spiva and Josh Hoen discuss how a new initiative reframes student success by combining institutional reform with holistic support to position community colleges as engines of academic persistence and economic mobility.
The EvoLLLution (Evo): What structural barriers within the community college system does this initiative aim to dismantle, and how might it redefine student success at the national level?
Yolanda Watson Spiva (YS): This initiative is focused on addressing the systemic and structural issues that have long hindered student success within the community college system. That includes financial insecurity, limited access to advising and career guidance, and competing work and family responsibilities. While Complete College America does not work directly with students, we advocate on their behalf by removing structural barriers that impact their outcomes. One Million Degrees, on the other hand, offers a proven, holistic student support model with a 73% degree completion rate.
Josh Hoen (JH): By partnering, we are combining OMD’s high-impact, community-level student services with our strengths in policy and data. Together, this collaboration has the potential to redefine student success nationally by demonstrating what’s possible when robust student support is paired with institutional transformation.
Community college students face numerous barriers, including limited access to advising and career guidance, financial insecurity and competing work and family responsibilities. This partnership is designed to address these hurdles at both the individual and institutional level.
At the student level, it offers the kind of personal and professional support that many learners, especially first-generation students, need to stay enrolled and thrive. At the institutional level, the partnership supports colleges in reimagining and scaling holistic student support programs that center persistence. Meeting students where they are and delivering the human-centered support that drives persistence is core to the One Million Degrees model in Chicago. This collaboration is about bringing that proven approach to more students and more colleges across the country.
Evo: How do you envision this partnership shifting the national conversation on the role of community colleges in advancing economic mobility and workforce readiness?
YS: We see community colleges as powerful but often overlooked engines of economic growth and mobility. We want credentials earned at the community college level to be seen as just as viable—if not more so—than those at the bachelor’s level. This partnership aims to elevate that narrative by using data-driven practices that center both students’ economic well-being and the labor market’s needs.
Ultimately, the partnership is about accelerating impact for students and reshaping how the nation values community colleges as quicker, more direct pathways to meaningful employment and upward mobility.
JH: We’ve always believed that community colleges are uniquely positioned to be engines of economic mobility. They offer open-access, low-cost education to students, many of whom have been historically excluded from pathways to economic advancement. Their mission is deeply tied to workforce readiness, and they tend to serve populations most in need of moving up the ladder, but community colleges are too often not viewed or valued that way.
This partnership helps elevate and amplify that role by integrating employer perspectives directly into the design student support. It ensures students are earning credentials while gaining the durable skills, networks and confidence needed to succeed in today’s workforce. We aim to shift the national conversation to one that better recognizes community colleges as more than access points and instead as powerful platforms for upward mobility and long-term economic success.
Evo: In what ways can wraparound supports become the standard, not the exception, for student services across all postsecondary institutions?
YS: As the former leader of two scholarship organizations, I’ve seen firsthand how transformative wraparound supports can be. When institutions engage with the full humanity of their students by ensuring that barriers, not just academic but financial and personal, don’t stand in the way of their success, it fundamentally changes outcomes. Wraparound support should be the baseline, not a luxury. Strategic partnerships like this one offer a sustainable model for institutions to integrate these supports more effectively.
JH: What we’ve found is that, when we deliver wraparound supports at a certain level of quality and consistency, the impact on student outcomes is significant enough that it can generate a sustainable return for institutions. This result can ultimately lead to stronger student retention, more state funding tied to performance metrics and increased tuition revenue. That’s a powerful financial incentive for investing in wraparound support.
Evo: What lessons from this initiative could we apply to broader higher education reform, especially when it comes to supporting adult learners and first-generation students?
YS: At Complete College America, our strategic plan is fully focused on college completion and long-term student success. Holistic student support is a core pillar of our strategy. Our partnership with OMD will help us accelerate this work by establishing a structured community of practice across our national alliance.
Importantly, we are committed to specifically identifying solutions we can scale. For us, success is about more than individual student completion. It’s about transforming systems to create lasting, measurable outcomes for students and their communities. Scale is central to everything we do, and this partnership will generate insights and lessons that can be applied at institutions across the country.
JH: One key lesson is the importance of taking the core principles of effective wraparound support One Million Degrees practices and embedding them across existing student services. This initiative shows that you don’t always need to build entirely new systems. You can infuse the spirit and structure of models like ours into what already exists.
A particularly innovative aspect of the model is how it ties support to a clear engagement rubric, as well as to a stipend for students, which acknowledges the time and effort required to persist in college, especially for adult learners balancing work and family. It respects the real demands students face, and it’s exactly the kind of approach higher education needs more of.
Evo: How do you measure long-term success in a program like this, not just in graduation rates but in lifelong impact on students and communities?
YS: To support adult learners and first-generation students, we must move beyond treating them as outliers. Too often we expect them to navigate higher education like traditional students, despite juggling multiple responsibilities and unique challenges. When we do offer tailored support that meets their realities, we often treat it as an exception rather than the rule. That has to change.
This pilot allows us to collect both qualitative and quantitative data that reflect these learners’ lived experiences, which will help us better integrate their realities into institutional design and support structures. As a result, we can measure the program’s long-term success through a more holistic lens.
This pilot includes traditional indicators like time to degree, graduation rates and employment outcomes, but it also includes more expansive metrics, such as the adoption rate of structural and student support reforms, institutional efficiencies such as dollars saved through streamlined operations and the number and percentage of students receiving wraparound services, disaggregated by type.
JH: While graduation rates are essential measures, they’re only part of the picture. Long-term success also means looking beyond the classroom to what happens after students leave campus. Are they securing meaningful careers? Are they experiencing upward economic mobility? How about gaining the confidence and skills to navigate life’s challenges? These personal outcomes are central to how we define success.
It’s also critical to understand whether a program is sustainable and whether the practices are being adopted within the broader student affairs ecosystem. Long-term impact comes when these approaches aren’t seen as add-ons but as fundamental to how colleges serve students. That’s when we know we’re not only changing individual trajectories but reshaping systems and communities for the better.
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