To strengthen students’ pathways through postsecondary education and into in-demand careers, employers and colleges must work more closely together. Industry-led public‒private partnerships have tremendous potential to build and grow these employer‒college relationships, but little information is available on these partnerships and their postsecondary initiatives. This project aims to fill this gap and foster the growth of these initiatives by highlighting the features of industry-led public‒private partnerships’ initiatives with postsecondary institutions and providing lessons and opportunities for developing, sustaining, and scaling these initiatives. The project website hosts a report, geographic map, directory, and recorded webinar to foster information sharing.

Postsecondary administrators interested in serving parenting adult learners (PALs) need to know more about them and the supports they need in their pursuit and completion of postsecondary credentials. This project leverages data from an AIR survey of adult learners and one-on-one interviews with a subset of parenting adult learners to answer three key questions: 1) What factors contribute to PALs’ decisions to enroll in college? 2) What do the academic experiences of PALs look like? and 3) What supports and resources do PALs use and want? Building on a broad research base on the experiences of parenting students, results from this research shed light on the particular experiences of adult learners with children and point to ways practitioners and policymakers can better align programs and resources to this student population.

AIR is investigating the supports and services offered in sector-based training programs that have demonstrated positive effects on individuals’ long-term labor market outcomes. The project’s goal is to identify whether similarities or differences exist in the types of advising and student supports that effective sectoral programs offer, and how these may differ from typical community college advising practices. We will seek to develop a set of hypotheses about particular practices that may contribute to trainees’ success in sectoral programs, and the challenges and potential levers available for adapting these practices to postsecondary settings, accounting for the ways in which sectoral programs are staffed and funded. Ultimately, we hope this framework could be used to explore (1) whether and how specific community colleges have established these practices within their institutions and (2) the feasibility of adapting and implementing these practices within community colleges that might be ripe for reform.

American Institutes for Research is conducting a developmental evaluation of the Detroit Drives Degrees Community College Collaborative (D3C3) initiative, which is focused on improving student outcomes and reducing equity gaps through regional collaboration, college-level changes, and improved use of data to inform decisions and actions. The developmental evaluation seeks to codesign a culturally responsive evaluation that will generate actionable insights for the field and support continuous improvement and fundamental learning.

American Institutes for Research is conducting a synthesis of two largely separate bodies of literature on undergraduate STEM classroom interventions: (a) motivational interventions (e.g., values affirmation) and (b) instructional interventions (e.g., active learning). The synthesis will include both experimental and quasi-experimental evaluations of these interventions, focusing on effects for retention (e.g., taking the next STEM course, graduating with a STEM degree) and motivational factors related to retention (e.g., interests, self-efficacy, sense of belonging). Additional moderation analyses will investigate how intervention design features, student demographics, and the implementation context may help explain why some studies show stronger effects than others.