The Project on Workforce and Education Design Lab release case studies of four community colleges deploying promising data and technology practices to improve economic outcomes for their students.
Edited by Joseph B. Fuller, Kerry McKittrick, and Amanda Holloway
Across the country, community colleges serve as critical engines of workforce development—partnering with regional employers, creating career pathways, and expanding opportunities for historically marginalized students. But as the labor market evolves and emerging technologies like generative AI reshape industries, how can these institutions ensure their students are prepared to thrive in the workforce?
This volume explores how four diverse community colleges—Hudson County Community College (NJ), Community College of Aurora (CO), South Texas College (TX), and Riverland Community College (MN)—are using labor market information and student outcomes data, industry partnerships, and cutting-edge technology to help students access high-growth careers.
Researchers Simba Gandari, Courtnei Sanders, Arnold Lopez and Ram Hernandez collaborated with the community colleges to conduct rigorous qualitative research over a period of five months. Nearly 150 individuals across the four regions—including college leaders, faculty, staff, students, employers, policymakers, and other experts—participated in interviews or focus groups to inform this work. The result is four detailed case studies, each of which highlights promising data and technology practices and other successful initiatives at the institution.
LMI and student outcomes data are invaluable for guiding strategic resource allocation. The community colleges featured in this volume use LMI and student performance data to build, modify, and sunset academic programs and services. By investing in data partnerships and regular program reviews, leaders can focus on programs and supports that propel learners into high-growth careers. Tracking student outcomes post-completion remains a challenge, but emerging technologies and state data partnerships can lead to improvements.
Real-time LMI, while a powerful resource, has limitations–and there is no substitute for employer relationships. Job postings data provides key insights into labor market trends, like occupation demand, skills and degree requirements, job mobility, and compensation. That said, the data can be difficult to interpret, and it is highly imperfect. There are often “phantom postings,” it relies on overly-complicated job descriptions, and it is not reliably forward-looking. College leaders highlighted the importance of validating and supplementing real-time LMI with meaningful employer relationships to ensure alignment between education offerings and workforce needs.
Innovative college leadership is essential. It would seem to be a platitude, but each of the institutions captured in this volume relies on a proven, forward-thinking leader. They put workforce development at the core of the college mission, prioritize equity, and embrace new practices and technologies. These presidents are unafraid to take risks and embrace data-driven decisions, even when it disrupts existing structures and processes. Each leader has positioned their institution as a central player in their economic ecosystem that serves learners, workers, and regional employers.
Institutions are adopting new technology tools and platforms, particularly in student services. The colleges in this volume are proactively leveraging digital tools, platforms, and analytics capabilities to enhance student services and academic offerings. Career coaching tools, chatbots, and data dashboards provide real-time analyses of job opportunities and enable college staff to identify and support struggling students. Colleges are integrating new technologies into curricula and leveraging emerging tools to address equity gaps and keep up with the rapid pace of change, but they are in the very early days of responding to advances in generative AI.
Leveraging data and technology strategically requires significant institutional investment. Access to real-time LMI can be costly; and it requires data experts to analyze and interpret. Technology tools and platforms also come at a cost, and mounting resource constraints make it difficult for schools to use data to the fullest. Colleges must prioritize their capacity to harness data–including infrastructure, processes, culture, and personnel–in order to maximize its impact. This will, in turn, help them improve resource allocation.
Colleges are working to standardize and streamline processes and overcome historical departmental distinctions. Leaders recognize that changes in the labor market and technology transcend historical separations between departments, faculty, and credit/non-credit programs. But aligning data from different sources, sharing information across colleges, and standardizing processes remains a challenge for many institutions. It can be difficult to scale innovative practices and track relationships across previously distinct, ever-evolving institutions, but they are embracing new tools and strategies to overcome these hurdles.
State policy shows promise catalyzing advanced data practices. State policies and investments in college capacities, such as Texas HB 8, can encourage meaningful data use and collaboration across regional stakeholders. State agencies can act as key data partners, providing LMI and other support to help institutions track and improve economic outcomes. On the other hand, state processes, like lengthy curriculum approvals, can be a hindrance to colleges as they work to adapt to changing market demands.
Colleges are embracing data-backed programs to serve diverse student populations. They are investing in initiatives like stackable credentials and dual enrollment programs to meet the needs of adult learners and high school students, who make up an increasing share of the student population.
About the Project
Data and Technology in Action: Advancing Economic Mobility at Community Colleges is a joint initiative between the Project on Workforce and Education Design Lab which seeks to improve the ways community colleges leverage real-time labor market information (LMI) and emerging technologies to advance economic mobility for their students. Learn more about the project.
About the Project on Workforce at Harvard
The Project on Workforce is an interdisciplinary, collaborative project between the Harvard Kennedy School’s Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy, the Harvard Business School Managing the Future of Work Project, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The Project produces and catalyzes basic and applied research at the intersection of education and labor markets for leaders in business, education, and policy. The Project’s research aims to help shape a postsecondary system of the future that creates more and better pathways to economic mobility and forges smoother transitions between education and careers.
About Education Design Lab
Education Design Lab (the Lab) is a national nonprofit that co-designs, prototypes, and tests education-to-workforce models through a human-centered design process focused on understanding learners’ experiences, addressing equity gaps in higher education, and connecting learners to economic mobility. The Lab believes human-centered design allows colleges and universities to map and galvanize their existing strengths to meet the needs of the learners they serve. The Lab’s process also shows higher education leaders how to consider the needs of employers, using the curriculum and program design as a gateway to make skills more visible to learners and employers alike.
Please direct inquiries to: Kerry McKittrick (kerry_mckittrick@gse.harvard.edu)
Suggested Citation: Joseph B. Fuller, Kerry McKittrick and Amanda Holloway (Eds.). (February 2025). Data & Technology In Action: Community Colleges Advancing Economic Mobility. Published by the Harvard Kennedy School.