Podcast Roundup: The Intermediaries at the Hub of Accelerated Pathways Work
What would it take for every high school student to have the opportunity to complete a semester of college credits without the financial burden?
This is the question that drives the work of over 25 communities that make up the Accelerate ED community. The goal? To create an environment that enables young people to attain at least 12 transferable college credits by high school graduation, putting them on the fast track to an Associate degree or beyond in a high-demand career.
In order to accomplish this goal, programs must have intentional, integrated curricular experiences and student supports. They must also be designed to both minimize the barriers that often impede student success and be sustainable via public funding so that they impose no cost to students.
Intense coordination and capacity is necessary to build seamless accelerated programs that weave together connections between multiple high schools, colleges and universities, and workforce systems. It can be difficult for staff and teachers in an individual high school or district to establish and sustain these complex partnerships.
This critical role is often filled by “intermediaries” – organizations that provide valuable capacity for expanding pathways, including via:
- Building Partnerships: Intermediaries build trust, credibility, and strong working relationships with the wide range of partners who have a stake in this work. Serving as a convener, intermediaries set the table with multiple partners across K-12, higher education, workforce, funders, policymakers, and other key stakeholders.
- Supporting Pathways Design and Delivery: Intermediaries support the development, refinement, and delivery of pathway programming by sector partners. Having a birds-eye view, they are able to look across systems to build connections and foster stronger alignment.
- Collecting and Leveraging Data: Intermediaries use data to inform pathway programming and assess learner outcomes. This can include analyzing local labor market data to identify in-demand industries, engaging partners to identify credentials of value, and leveraging longitudinal data to assess the impact of programming on students’ educational and career outcomes.
- Supporting Policy & Funding Strategy: Intermediaries help to cultivate a policy and funding environment that promotes equitable pathways. In addition to cultivating the awareness and buy-in necessary to advance policy priorities and generate momentum for new funding streams, they can steward relationships with funders and advise on how to leverage existing funding across sectors to support the work.
And while these organizations are critical to the work of building and scaling accelerated pathways, there is no one-size-fits-all type of intermediary organization that can be easily prescribed to local geographies. Depending on local organizational strengths and priorities, we have worked with a variety of types of intermediaries, including: chambers of commerce, workforce development agencies, regional cradle-to-career partnerships, college access networks, local philanthropic organizations, individual community colleges, and other statewide and local educational nonprofit organizations. Regardless of organizational type, all have a commitment to ensuring students have the skills and opportunities to participate in the economic development and growth that is sustaining these locales.
Recently, four of these intermediary organizations that are leading this work within their respective Accelerate ED communities sat down with the Getting Smart podcast to discuss their unique approaches to building accelerated pathways.
The Massachusetts Alliance for Early College
In Massachusetts, white students from non-low income homes have 50% odds of earning a college degree within six years of graduating high school; Black or Latino students, or those from low-income homes, have only 20% odds.
“The good news is that we have a model that works to close those gaps, and that is early college. It is succeeding in delivering college degrees, especially in communities that are underrepresented on college campuses,” says Erika Giampietro, Executive Director at the Massachusetts Alliance for Early College.
This also matters because it impacts the local workforce. In Massachusetts, projections show that the state will lose 200,000 college educated workers by 2030, at the same time that employers need those workers.
“We are an independent 501c3 organization that exists to see early college thrive in MA and meet its potential for the Commonwealth’s students through robust, high-impact programs,” says Giampietro. “We are an independent collaborative; we work collaboratively with our public agency partners, but we also work independently because we operate in a way others in the space can’t. We can advocate; we can lobby; we can push for bold goals; we can form a wide tent, and bring more and more stakeholders into the work. We are policy and practice.”
Learn to Earn Dayton
Learn to Earn Dayton is a non-profit organization doing place-based, cradle to career work in Montgomery County, Ohio with influence and impact throughout the state.
“Our purpose is to ensure all of our students, and their families, in our region can thrive, regardless of race, gender, or zip code,” says Stacy Wall Schweikhart, CEO of Learn to Earn Dayton. “There is a reality in Dayton, Ohio, as I am sure there is across the country, that we have to be working as a community—with industry leaders, with higher education institutions, with credentialing organizations to have a strategy for adults in our communities who need skills, training, credentials, degrees, for them to be ready for the jobs that are emerging and rapidly expanding in our region.”
Learn to Earn Dayton focuses on bringing together the right stakeholders to ensure that seamless, accelerated pathways can take root in the region. “We are a collective impact organization, and we don’t do any work on our own. It is all in deep partnership and it is aligning all those different systems that intersect to serve our students and families.”
Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce
The Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce is a membership organization focused on creating a business friendly environment in Arizona. Much of that work is around public policy and advocacy, economic development, and business connectivity.
“We started an economic development initiative ten years ago, focused on business retention and expansion; the one thing we heard over and over again from the business community was that there was not a sufficient workforce for them to grow and expand their businesses. If we were going to impact economic development, we had to help employers come together to meet those needs,” said Jennifor Mellor, Chief Innovation Officer at the Chamber.
An example of what that looks like in practice is that the Chamber—which was able to convene employers by sectors—heard from the healthcare industry that there was a critical need for specialty nurses. So the Chamber partnered with local community colleges to create two new specialty nursing programs. They also lobbied state legislators to appropriate funds for those colleges to build new labs to give those students the experience they needed to be able to find a job immediately after receiving their credentials.
McClure Foundation
By many measures, Vermont is the most rural state in the country. And for a long time, Vermont students’ college continuation rates had been the lowest in New England. The McClure Foundation, a state-based foundation, is working to make postsecondary education accessible in order to open the door to lifelong opportunities.
“The foundation is working to close opportunity gaps by making postsecondary education an easy choice for young Vermonters,” says Carolyn Weir, the Executive Director of the McClure Foundation. “In all our work, we are trying to improve the pathways that lead to those most promising jobs through education and training.
The role of college and career training and education equity is really central to the philanthropic mission of many of the statewide foundations, including McClure.
“Accelerated pathways are a huge lever,” says Weir. “We are two years into a five year grant to help fund the Free Degree Promise—a promise we made that all students in the Vermont high school classes of 2023-2026 have the opportunity to earn a free associate degree through the state’s Early College program at the Community College of Vermont (CCV). One of the things that we are excited to see is a shift in the enrollment footprint, and in the equity make up of that cohort. We have about 235 students enrolled, and that cohort represents almost 90% of Vermont’s high schools. And that is a 70% increase in enrollment in the program, which is enrollment in our community college, since 2020. That increase includes low-income students, students of color. And now, through Accelerate ED, this is a strategy that is being recognized nationally as a way to support youth development, youth success, and educational attainment equity.”
