Insights

Financial aid can play a critical role in helping adult learners overcome the costs of college. This brief examines the financial aid programs available to adult learners in California’s community colleges, including patterns of application, eligibility, and receipt. It identifies gaps and structural barriers that can prevent eligible students from accessing aid and highlights opportunities to better support adult learners through financial assistance.

What does college return on investment look like when we consider more than earnings alone and center the experiences of adult learners who paused their education and later returned to complete their degrees? New research from California Competes finds that the value of college includes personal and social benefits in addition to financial benefits, weighed against the financial, opportunity, and personal costs of attending. This research draws on interviews with comebacker graduates (students who stopped out and later returned and completed college).

California is home to over 6 million adults ages 25 to 54 with a high school diploma  but no college degree. This analysis examines who they are along with the barriers and opportunities shaping their path to college completion, economic mobility, and career advancement.

Forthcoming research explores the demand for college among working-age adults, including how and where prospective learners want to study. With 6.8 million adults planning to enroll in college or pursue further education and training within the next two years, the findings can help California build flexible, affordable, and accessible pathways that connect more learners to opportunity.

COMING SOON

This report examines the gap between public workforce training programs and the occupations employers need, drawing on analysis across 14 states. It highlights emerging state approaches and outlines opportunities for states, the U.S. Department of Labor, and Congress to make workforce training more responsive to changing labor market demand.

California has made strides in financial aid application completion, but too many students still miss out on aid for which they qualify. This analysis finds that about 137,000 California Community College students who were likely eligible for Pell Grants but did not apply could have accessed up to $534 million in Pell funds in 2019–20. The report explores who these students are and strategies for increasing aid access.

This blog from California Competes and The Institute for College Access & Success explores how California can leverage Workforce Pell implementation to strengthen its higher education and workforce systems.

This companion brief is the first in a series accompanying The New Learning Contract: California’s Path to Direct Assessment Competency-Based Education. It makes a foundational argument: that learning, not course completion, must be the organizing logic of higher education. The brief examines what that shift requires in practice, including how we assess competence, how faculty work is structured, and how prior learning gets recognized consistently across the system. Centering learning, the brief argues, is where the work of transformation begins.

Student parents balance academics, work, and family responsibilities, yet gaps in data often leave their experiences and needs overlooked. This report uses federal data to examine who California student parents are, their educational and financial circumstances, and the barriers they encounter on the path to a credential.

This blog and op-ed series shares the experiences of student parents and their allies in their own voices. The aim is to help keep changemakers grounded in what matters most to student parents and the supports that advance their academic success and well-being, helping build stronger pathways to multigenerational success.

The Student Parent Resource Hub is a one-stop tool for finding and comparing supports at California’s public colleges and universities, including child care, child-friendly study spaces, student parent groups, and food pantries.

Published in Inside Higher Ed during #CAWorkingLearnerWeek, Workforce Pell’s Real Test Isn’t Access. It’s What Happens Next. explores what it will take for short-term workforce credentials to deliver lasting value for students balancing education, work, and life. Co-authored by Brianna Huynh, a member of Transfer Nation California’s Learner Advisory Board, the article draws on lessons from the transfer experience to challenge the assumption that credentials labeled portable and stackable will necessarily help learners advance. At its heart is a question especially relevant to working learners — how do we ensure that the time, money, and effort they invest in learning continue to count as they move between jobs, institutions, and educational opportunities?