About the Postsecondary Enrollment Playbook
Postsecondary Enrollment Playbook: Chapter 4
Overview
Postsecondary enrollment is a powerful pathway to economic mobility and long-term stability. With 70% of U.S. jobs expected to require education or training beyond high school by 2031, what comes after graduation matters more than ever. Postsecondary options — including two- and four-year colleges, career and technical education programs, apprenticeships and the skilled trades — all share a common goal: preparing students for careers that offer a living wage and a future. Communities can expand access to these pathways through strong college and career counseling, rigorous coursework, financial support and coordinated systems that help every student find and pursue their next step.
StriveTogether’s Cradle-to-Career Playbook: Postsecondary Enrollment synthesizes leading research, indicators and evidence-based practices to improve outcomes in postsecondary enrollment across communities. While the playbook builds on existing frameworks that are valuable in their own right, it does not replace them. Instead, it serves as a comprehensive tool that guides you to resources in areas where deeper exploration is needed. Communities can use the 12 essential questions to navigate to topics relevant to their specific needs, interests and goals.
The Education-to-Workforce Framework and supporting research
Mathematica’s Education-to-Workforce Framework is the inspiration behind the playbook’s organization and content. StriveTogether’s Cradle-to-Career Playbook: Postsecondary Enrollment includes all of the applicable research, content and aligned essential questions included in the Education-to-Workforce Framework. It is also organized in a similar way. The playbook supplements the Education-to-Workforce Framework by incorporating research on early childhood reading development, strategies for improving high school graduation rates, the need for high-quality, trained representative educators and more. Eighty-one percent (47 out of 58) of the indicators, practices and policies included in the Postsecondary Enrollment Playbook come from the Education-to-Workforce Framework.
About the playbook structure
The playbook is organized around 12 essential questions that help communities understand their starting point and identify potential focus areas. Each question offers a menu of possible practices and policies to implement, as well as key indicators to track.
Essential questions: areas to focus
The 12 essential questions help communities ask and answer questions that help them identify areas where co-designed solutions can improve postsecondary enrollment rates. The content of each question provides starting points for designing and collaborating on solutions. Inspired by and aligned with the Education-to-Workforce Framework, these questions are clear, offer various entry points for communities and provide an organizing structure for elaboration.
The playbook includes close to 1,000 indicators, policies and practices, though implementing all of them is neither necessary nor intended. Each community has its own unique assets, needs and resources. StriveTogether’s Cradle-to-Career Playbook: Postsecondary Enrollment helps communities identify key metrics to track, pinpoint effective strategies and determine where to start, enabling them to steadily improve postsecondary enrollment.
Indicators: metrics to track
Contributing indicators help communities see what it looks like when postsecondary enrollment rates improve for learners across a community. Contributing indicators are valuable because research shows they influence outcomes in a positive direction and are measured at the individual learner level (e.g., percentage of students enrolling in college). They can help communities establish student-centered priorities and provide information earlier than outcome data is available, allowing communities to know if an initiative is working and to support continuous improvement of multiple initiatives.
Systems indicators help communities track the supports that influence outcomes at the system level, such as district, city, county or state efforts. These indicators are crucial because they allow communities to monitor the system, identify gaps and address them proactively. Measured at the family, caregiver or geographic level, systems indicators reflect institutional actions and their impact. For example, the percentage of eligible families with access to a library within walking distance is a key system indicator that reveals how well resources are distributed.
Practices and policies: actions to take
Practices and policies describe what can be done at every level of the system. Practices are evidence-based efforts, like teacher professional development, that create strong conditions for results. Policies are laws, regulations, procedures, administrative actions or incentives of governments or other institutions. Communities may see a policy listed that is currently not enacted in their district, city or state, offering an opportunity to align on advocacy efforts. Federal policies are listed to create awareness so communities can leverage or utilize them to support state and local efforts.
Scaling a solution often has a lifecycle that starts with a local practice that is proven effective, scaled locally (e.g., scaled from a classroom to a district, then to another district) and then used to inform the creation of a state-level policy that provides access to funding for further scaling.
This approach is outlined within the StriveTogether Theory of Action™. This playbook categorizes strategies into a practice or policy. But, a practice can turn into a policy over time or a policy can initiate a practice if it comes first. Lines begin to blur as scale takes over.
Not every contributing indicator has an identified systems indicator, practice or policy. That may be a result of limited research available or identified to date. Indicators, practices and policies can help answer multiple essential questions, but for simplicity, we’ve grouped each indicator with one essential question. To help communities choose the most relevant indicators for their context, each indicator is presented as it appears in its original source. This allows communities to understand the specific nuances that may be important to them. However, this approach means the language of indicators may vary, some may be duplicated across different sources, and language choices may need to change based on local preferences.
This resource aims to be an encyclopedia of evidence-based indicators and implementation strategies that can be used with community groups, referenced during annual planning and leveraged to prioritize initiatives as needed. Its purpose is to help you and your community understand possible levers at every level — learner, neighborhood, school, district, city and state — to improve postsecondary enrollment rates.
How to use this playbook
How this playbook is used will be different for each organization or community, depending on their planning process, goals and priorities. The playbook might be shared with a community working group in its entirety, referenced internally as a way to brainstorm potential solutions to discuss with others or leveraged in various other ways. After reading it, leaders can ask: How do we want to use this with our community?
This resource does not replace the voice and perspective of community members, who often know the solutions that will work best in their communities. Instead, consider this playbook a resource that community members can also access to support the co-designing of solutions and to inform your planning. For support on engaging with your community, visit StriveTogether’s Results-Based Facilitation 101 course, available for free on the Training Hub.
This playbook offers several practical uses for community organizations. It can be used to onboard new staff or introduce organizations to cradle-to-career work. It helps explore aligned practices and policies, guiding the selection of working group topics and potential solutions. Communities can share the entire playbook with working groups or community members to support exploration and implementation. Additionally, it serves as a valuable resource during internal reviews for annual goal-setting and planning. Finally, this playbook can be used alongside other StriveTogether resources for a more comprehensive approach. If you are interested in diving deeper into the research supporting the indicators, visit the citations included throughout the playbook. The appendix also includes an annotated bibliography.
Due to the limited research on place-based partnerships, StriveTogether’s Cradle-to-Career Playbook: Postsecondary Enrollment highlights initiatives and examples from StriveTogether Cradle to Career Network members making clear progress on their postsecondary enrollment outcomes, illustrating what has worked for them.
Playbook ChaptersPostsecondary Enrollment Playbook
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