Partnership Puts Students on Pathways to College

“Our goal is to enable many more of these students to go to and succeed at college,” said Ann Coles, co-chair of the network. “What our work does is connect parents, students, and schools with effective strategies—strategies that we know work.”

That has been the goal since the beginning, when the network was little more than an idea, according to Richard W. Riley, who served as the secretary of education in the Clinton administration and now sits on ACT’s Board of Directors.

“A lot of people had put in a lot of hard work on this college access issue for many, many years. And we still had hundreds of students every year who were not able to benefit from going to college,” Riley said. “We had all of these single organizations that had this same mission. We thought that by stimulating cooperation we could have more impact.”

Today, with more than $2 million dedicated to its first three years of work, the Pathways to College Network is having an effect. The organization unites researchers, policymakers, and educators as it works to create a national strategy for developing and disseminating effective, research-based practices that prepare underserved students for college. It aims to link college access programs with school reform initiatives. And it works to establish the expectation that college access programs and related school reform initiatives be data driven, thus increasing the likelihood that they can be properly evaluated, sustained, scaled up, and expanded.

Those goals align closely with ACT’s priorities.

“ACT wants to collaborate with other groups to prepare at-risk students for college,” said Don Carstensen, vice president of Educational Services. “We want to expand our involvement in research and national discussion aimed at informing policy decisions on significant educational issues.”

“ACT has a wonderful access network itself. It is looked upon with respect in the higher education world, and that is an excellent contribution to the network,” said Riley.

Right now, Pathways organizers are focusing their efforts on the transition points between pre-kindergarten and college. Transitions are a focus for many ACT programs, too, especially within EPAS^®, ACT’s Educational Planning and Assessment System, which comprises EXPLORE^®, PLAN^®, and the ACT Assessment^®.

“ACT is one of the key leaders in facilitating student transitions,” Coles said. “The information from ACT assessment tools is helpful to both teachers and parents because it says ‘Here’s where your students are doing well and here’s where they need to focus in order to be well prepared for college.’ ”

Coles also noted that ACT brings a wealth of data from its wide-ranging research to Pathways, and can help the network address gaps in research through its continuing focus on how best to prepare students for success in college.

“ACT is interested in young people having access, having pathways to college. It is important to ACT. One of ACT’s higher callings is to have young people be prepared to be good college students and then to actually be good college students,” said Riley.

“All of us who are concerned about education need to be concerned about education from preschool forward. ACT is a good example of a major national organization that is concerned with all of education, from preschool through college.”