The goal of Education Design Lab’s Reimagining Community Colleges initiative is to transform community colleges into future-ready, inclusive institutions that adapt to the evolving needs of both their students and regional employers.
By Bryana Ellis, Education Designer at Education Design Lab
While strategic planning is a fundamental practice in higher education, it’s crucial to acknowledge its limitations. Most colleges engage in this process regularly, mapping out institutional goals across a multi-year timeline and aligning initiatives with metrics such as enrollment, completion, and retention. However, when these models fall short in addressing today’s rapidly evolving learner needs, workforce demands, and equity gaps, it’s time to consider a new approach.
The Reimagining Community Colleges (RCC) design challenge builds upon more than a decade of Lab-led efforts to envision and plan for a new age of community colleges. Since early 2025, five community colleges across the nation have been working with the Lab to reorient their programs around New Majority Learner-Earners and the future-proof skills they need to succeed in the workforce.
Five community colleges are participating: Rio Salado College, Ariz.; Saint Paul College, Minn.; Forsyth Technical Community College, N.C.; Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C), Ohio; Lone Star College-Tomball, Texas.
During our first year, the colleges will work with the Lab to develop strategic transformation plans that help them realize the vision articulated in the Lab’s Future of Learning Framework. Once colleges have developed their transformation plans, the Lab will support each of them through design challenges, data support, access to resources, and ongoing technical assistance to realize the vision outlined in their respective plans.
How is this design challenge different from traditional strategic planning?
It’s not just about setting goals. Our process challenges institutions to move beyond static documents and toward living, collaborative frameworks that are centered on human experience, responsive to industry shifts, grounded in equity, and designed to create new models. Here’s how the RCC approach stands apart and why that distinction matters:
A human-centered approach
Design sessions, student panels, and iterative engagement moments such as the “Reimagining Day” events create space for lived experiences to shape what transformation should look like. This inclusive, bottom-up approach results in plans that are more grounded, relevant, and sustainable.
One powerful moment came from Forsyth Tech’s Photovoice Wall — a visual display of student-submitted photos and stories about their lived experiences on campus. Multiple students stood in front of the wall with full hearts, recognizing their own truths reflected at them. One student whispered, “Wow, they really shared that?,” surprised that such a raw, personal submission had been honored so publicly. That moment wasn’t just about the display. It was about being seen.
“Reimagining Day gave our students and faculty a real seat at the table. You could feel the shift when learners started naming challenges that weren’t even on our radar and that helped us reframe them as design opportunities.”
— RCC college team member
When students feel validated, they show up differently. RCC built conditions for students to be treated as experts of their own experiences, shifting power dynamics in the planning process and expanding what’s possible.
From incremental shift to real transformation
Most strategic plans aim for steady progress. RCC, however, encourages colleges to dream bigger. It inspires them to imagine what doesn’t exist yet, to push the boundaries of what’s possible in higher education.
Three participating institutions including Cuyahoga Community College, Forsyth Technical Community College and Saint Paul College are developing innovative concepts which include AI readiness and stackable credentials, regional employer pledges, and tuition-free models. The implemented initiatives will drive substantial institutional changes which result in higher student involvement and better student retention and stronger local community connections. The process of transformation needs more than minor adjustments to succeed. The process demands institutions to take risks while continuously improving their models and to transform their fundamental identity through internal innovation.
Career-connected pathways are at the core
The traditional strategic plans view workforce development as one element of their overall strategy, but RCC makes career-connected learning and regional economic growth its main focus. The strategy design process at RCC starts with regional economic needs and employer validation as its core foundation. The validation process of student pathways by real-world skill demands ensures their education leads directly to career advancement opportunities. RCC implements workforce development strategies that focus on student career success rather than basic job preparation.
Iterative and adaptive planning
The RCC planning process unfolds through a design arc that includes facilitated workshops and co-creation spaces, which evolve as institutions learn and refine their approaches. RCC’s approach helps the colleges to design blueprints that represent evolving student needs. That flexibility stands in contrast to traditional plans that, once finalized, often remain unchanged for years, even as the external landscape shifts. Once the plans are created, the Lab is staying with the colleges to help them with implementation and evaluation to ensure the design challenge is successful.
Culture change is part of the plan
Perhaps one of the most significant differences in RCC’s approach is its commitment to changing institutional culture, not just operations. RCC supports faculty, staff, and leadership in building capacity for ongoing innovation and growth. The Lab supporting the colleges through the implementation and evaluation stages is designed to ensure coaching, capacity building, and data support. This means planning to provide wraparound services, such as childcare and transportation, promoting culturally responsive teaching, and embedding a mindset of curiosity, experimentation, and equity into the process itself. RCC fosters a culture where transformation is not only possible but expected, and where every member of the institution is empowered to contribute to its success.
Designing for student success
Access and inclusion are not standalone elements of the RCC process — they are guiding principles that inform every aspect of institutional decision-making. Whether through expanded student support, more responsive policies, or flexible learning models that meet students’ diverse needs, RCC colleges are working to build systems that are more accessible and supportive by design. The goal is to thoughtfully identify and reduce barriers, creating environments where all students can thrive.
Community colleges are uniquely positioned to respond to the shifting dynamics of today’s learn+work ecosystems, but only if the planning models themselves evolve. RCC offers a path forward that prioritizes people over process, design over doctrine, and impact over intention.
In a time when institutions are being asked to do more with less, iterative and adaptive planning is essential to achieve faster results, with more equal opportunities, and more creativity. RCC demonstrates what’s possible when we rethink not just what we do, but how we do it.
This blog was authored by Bryana Ellis, Education Designer at Education Design Lab. Bryana designs and facilitates learner-centered initiatives that reimagine pathways in higher education. Her work focuses on co-designing with students and institutional partners, using participatory research methods to translate learner voice into strategies that expand access, agency, and belonging for underrepresented learners and communities.
