This brief describes how community colleges participating in the Career and Technical Education CoLab (CTE CoLab) Community of Practice are implementing student navigation strategies to improve outcomes for students of color. The CTE CoLab aims to reduce disparities in academic and career outcomes for historically marginalized students—especially students who are Black, Latinx, or Indigenous—enrolled in online and hybrid postsecondary CTE programs. This publication shares insights from college practitioners and related research to identify ways to further support the implementation of equity-centered student navigation strategies.

Why This Matters

Navigation supports are the actions college staff take to help students navigate their college experience, persist, and succeed in college. Examples include advising, mentoring, orientation programming, and other approaches that provide information, as well as access and connections to support services useful for getting ahead. Effective student navigation interventions support persistence, build students’ social capital, strengthen connections to resources and professional networks, and increase the likelihood of success for students of color and other historically marginalized students and underrepresented learners.

Increasing equitable results for students of color is important because students enter college with different sets of resources available to them, leading some to have less access to opportunity and upward mobility. Colleges can help address some of the barriers students of color face by thoughtfully designing navigation strategies and support services that help students persist within academic and career pathways. When colleges are easier to navigate, the benefits accrue to all students.

What We Found

• Equity-centered student navigation strategies involve: 1) using data to identify student needs, 2) providing multiple avenues to connect students to support services, and 3) leveraging institutional capacity (e.g., existing initiatives) to improve navigation and the delivery of services to students who are most impacted by systemic barriers.
• Examples of navigation strategies from CTE CoLab colleges include surveying students to understand their support needs, redesigning orientation programs, and offering peer-to-peer tutoring and professional development for adjunct faculty.
• College staff shared opportunities to make transformational change—lasting change that shifts organizational culture, operations, structures, and values—in their work to support student navigation. A key strategy they identified was finding partners within the institution to serve as collaborators and allies in equity work aimed at improving student outcomes.
• To further support the implementation of student navigation strategies focused on equity, colleges can continue to benchmark progress toward their equity goals over time and involve students in the interpretation of data and adaptations to programs.
• Colleges can also find ways to improve the existing infrastructure and processes at their institution to support student navigation. This includes embedding strategies into ongoing student success initiatives to leverage institutional capacity to improve the delivery of services to students.

How We Did It

In February and May of 2024, the Urban Institute convened two virtual roundtables of CTE CoLab practitioners to uplift staff expertise and experiences related to student navigation. The virtual roundtables included practitioners from each of the four participating colleges, Chippewa Valley Technical College, Diablo Valley College, Wake Technical Community College, and WSU Tech.

This brief primarily draws insights from the roundtables, each college’s equity action plan—which identifies goals and strategies for advancing racial equity aligned with the needs of their college—and related research literature to surface knowledge for the field about equity-centered student navigation strategies.