Students should be able to enroll with confidence and move through their educational experience with clear pathways and few obstacles.

Every college is implementing Guided Pathways, an equity-focused framework that allows us to forge clear paths for students and remove systemic obstacles to their success. Guided Pathways is a structure to provide all students with clear enrollment avenues, course-taking patterns, and support services. This framework centers the student experience in system-wide decision making and helps us meet the goals of the Vision for Success and Call to Action.

What Guided Pathways seeks to achieve

Advance Equity: Removing barriers that today’s students face, particularly students of color, first-generation students, students from low-income backgrounds, and working adults.

Transform Institutions: A highly structured, comprehensive approach to systemic change to improve students’ attainment of skills, credentials, and socioeconomic mobility. It is founded on the principle that everything can and should change.

Redefine Readiness: Fundamentally shifting the conversation about what it means to put students first, encouraging colleges to focus on their readiness for students rather than students’ readiness for college.

Redesign Supports: Recognizing that students need more than financial support and resources to be successful. It allows colleges to recognize and holistically support students’ academic and non-academic needs.

Embracing Guided Pathways

The Chancellor’s Office and partners are providing resources, programs, and support to help colleges identify friction points in student journeys and fundamentally redesign with the student in mind. In combination with funding provided by the legislature, these resources will support implementation of Guided Pathways and support student equity.

System-Wide Efforts to Support Colleges

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    Regional Coordinators

    Regional coordinators provide an important level of local support for colleges and districts in their Guided Pathways implementation. Locate a regional coordinator or get more information from the Success Center for California Community Colleges.
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    Scaling Learning

    Webinars elevate what is being learned across the colleges in Guided Pathways implementation and offer national examples from organizations, colleges, and leaders.

  • Student-centered Design and Integration

    We support colleges in integrating programs and braiding funding to support students' academic, digital, financial, and essential needs.
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    Technology

    We enable access to technology tools that help make processes less complicated and expensive as colleges simplify student pathways.
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    Innovation and Pilots

    We urge and support colleges to deliver culturally relevant curriculum and deliver instruction in innovative ways to honor students' unique needs, experiences, and contributions to classrooms.

Technical Assistance Partnerships

With support of philanthropic funding and national partners, the Chancellor’s Office is enabling full implementation of Guided Pathways at several institutions through two phases of demonstration projects. This will jump-start successful implementation and also provide a source of learning and best practices for all colleges.

  • Guided Pathways 1.0 supported 20 colleges in implementing Guided Pathways with structured support from the National Center for Inquiry and Improvement (NCII).
  • Guided Pathways 2.0 built on the 1.0 cohort by adding 23 new colleges. Through 2024, NCII is providing structured support to colleges through 2-3 day institutes, webinars, and virtual consultancies to help colleges implement GP.  All colleges can access resources developed in this project through the Vision Resource Center. In the Guided Pathways community of the Vision Resource Center, within the Guided Pathways 2.0 folder, anyone at a California community college can view recordings and presentations from the institutes and webinars, and read summaries of the institutes that include resources offered by presenters and by session participants. (see “Vision Resource Center” below for further details.)