Tod Treat

Bloggers Note: I first published this blog in December 2014 and continue to find relevance. In 2015, Thomas Bailey, Shanna Smith Jaggars, and Davis Jenkins published Redesigning America’s Community Colleges and Guided Pathways became a policy imperative, particularly in Washington State. State systems and colleges developing articulated pathways do well to focus on the trunk, not just the branches.

When I first wrote about curriculum leadership and audience challenges in 2011, I was struggling with the observation that students frequently don’t know what they want and may move back and forth between transfer and CTE programs (also known as Prof-Tech). Exploration of career interests suggest that students don’t really distinguish between transfer and CTE, yet we expect students to pick a major, pick a program, and select courses without building curricula that accommodate exploration. In fact, many curricula penalize exploration, leading to reduced satisfaction, success and completion, and increased debt.

Part of the problem is that institutions have grown intent on creating pathways that ‘accelerate’ completion. These curricula are streamlined, focused on employable knowledge and skills, and often delivered as low option cohorts so that student enter a lock step plan to completion in 100% of program time consistent with recommendations of Complete College America in Time is the Enemy of Completion. The recommendations are terrific…and I enthusiastically subscribe to most of them…but they assume that the student has clear intentions and, once clear of remediation, simply crank it out.

This is not how it works….students who are uncertain flow readily between CTE and transfer programs and are penalized when they are locked into a single source, single outcome pathway. Colleges need to spend more time working with their curriculum committees to ensure that students can identify an area of interest (a career cluster) that consists of both CTE and transfer options and ladders off of similar core courses so that uncertainty can be tolerated without lengthening significantly time to degree.

Career cluster models, like the one adopted by the Illinois Community College Board below can be effective for program redesign in that they cluster both related CTE/transfer programs and broader areas. (See About the National Career Clusters Framework – Advance CTE, Last Accessed June, 2026).

The model has been around for quite a while but it was only when I was speaking to a former colleague, Ellen Colbeck, that I realized the power of thinking about this in three dimensions. The essential knowledge and skills are really the trunk of a tree that all students must climb in order to be prepared for exploration in the tree canopy of career clusters and programs. The logic for this may seem obvious, but reform efforts intended to accelerate accrual of college credits have literally reached for ‘low hanging fruit’ by altering the prerequisites CTE Areas Secondary*, in effect lowering the length of the trunk to move students into the canopy faster.

Reduced time to completion in general is a good thing but quality matters too. The challenge for colleges is to reduce the length of the trunk (acceleration), ensure that the canopy has  logic and students can move within clusters (exploration), and ensure that students are ready for success in subsequent courses (preparation/prerequisites) in the canopy.

The impact of academic assessment on curricular redesign at a college scale is critical for meeting this third goal. For example, in 2013, my current college’s academic assessment team published a research study it had done on our Critical Thinking and Problem Solving Degree Learning Outcome. The findings supported the idea that students demonstrated a statistically significant difference in problem solving (in math) and critical thinking (in English) ability between completing the upper level developmental education course and the first college course. The obvious inference is that students who take college math and college English early (after all, they are still on the trunk, right?) may benefit, but do we advise students to do this or are our efforts to pluck low hanging fruit actually moving student to the canopy too soon? What do the data tell us and what are we going to do about it?

The implications for our curricula and advising in the face of reaching toward Completion with Quality are staggering and suggest a need for colleges to review their entire curriculum periodically and incorporate both completion goals and assessment data.

*Also known as program general education requirements.