Because community colleges are open-access institutions, we attract students of different ages and abilities, from disparate backgrounds and at various stages of their working lives. We strive to serve them all. In many instances, that means creating initiatives to address the needs of specific student populations. That’s why so many community colleges offer on-campus day care for student-parents, flexible online courses and programs for working students and corequisite support for students who need to learn foundational academic concepts. However, building initiatives from the ground up can induce institutional anxiety. New programs usually represent a significant investment of time, energy and scarce resources. And what if they don’t work?
As we at Lone Star College-Tomball have seen over the past decade, that may be the wrong way of thinking about population-specific programs. We’ve seen an initiative launched to help our neurodivergent students grow far beyond a single program for a particular underserved student population. By leaning into what’s known as the curb cut effect, we’re using the lessons we learned from building that program as a springboard for institutional transformation.
Lone Star’s lifePATH® program emerged from the same place as many other initiatives: Our community had a population of capable but underemployed neurodivergent students whom we wanted to serve more intentionally. To better support these students, we created a four-year program designed to help them develop their academic, career and personal skills. We embedded throughout the curriculum workplace competencies and expectations that these students needed to learn so they could be successful in the workforce. Like many degree programs, we required each student to complete an internship.
But here, we flipped the script. Rather than recruiting local employers simply willing to take our students as interns, we partnered with more than 50 local employers to understand the workplace skills they were seeking. Then we helped our students determine their own strengths, interests and career goals. Rather than make a convenient pairing, these internships represented a strong and deliberate match between student and employer. In other words, our students wanted to be at their internship, and they came equipped with the skills to contribute right away and continue to grow.
Not only does this approach help a traditionally underserved population find good jobs and true purpose in their lives, it also has spun off into several new directions. In 2019, the program expanded to the Lone Star College-Montgomery campus. That same year, the Texas Legislature allowed the Lone Star College System to offer lifePATH as a formal four-year program that awards an Occupational and Life Skills Associate (OLSA) degree upon completion. This degree program remains unique to this college system. The college is also designing an initiative to support other community colleges interested in offering the curriculum, assembling resources and forming employer partnerships to help neurodivergent students in their communities find academic and career success.
Potentially the most impactful result from the whole effort, though, emerged from our reflections on its purpose. Although we had built the program for a specific student population, we started to wonder why we weren’t taking a similar approach with all our students. We want to teach durable workforce skills for the 21st century—skills such as communication, problem solving, decision making, critical thinking and collaborating with colleagues and customers. Today, these skills are universal. Every student and every college graduate needs to possess them. And from the first day they set foot on campus, we should be helping them think about what they want their lives to be like and how we can help them gain the skills and knowledge to get there.
What we’ve learned is that it makes a huge difference to students when we invest in new ways of identifying and measuring critical thinking, teamwork and other critical skills. While grade-point average indicates students’ academic achievement, it sheds no light on the skills that students have actually learned and provides no tangible way for them to demonstrate their capabilities to potential employers. That’s why we’re working to embed lessons from lifePATH into more of our programs, regardless of which students they serve.
As a result, Lone Star College-Tomball is now working with the national nonprofit Education Design Lab to create a new measurement that will supplement the traditional GPA for all students by documenting their transferable and in-demand professional skills. This transformational work is intended to cut through the opacity of skills and provide a clearer picture of what learners know and can do. It’s ambitious, to be sure, but at the end of the day, students–whether they’re enrolled in lifePATH or not–will see more opportunities if they’re able to learn and demonstrate their skills.
Here’s the lesson for other institutions: An initiative that supports a specific student population might turn out to be broader in scope, much like sidewalk curb cuts intended for people with wheelchairs are regularly used by parents pushing strollers and children riding bicycles. By being open to learning from specific and bespoke initiatives and applying best practices from those projects to the student population at large, institutions can drive transformation that serves more students better than before.
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