Community colleges are under pressure to do more with less, and a new op-ed from our partners in Colorado shows what it looks like to go deeper instead of broader as a strategy for boosting economic mobility.

By using enrollment trends and regional wage data — and co‑designing with employers to build programs in high‑wage, high‑demand fields like healthcare — Community College of Aurora is redefining “access” as the ability to go deep on clear pathways that lead to meaningful employment or transfer opportunities.

That’s the same future the Lab is working toward with colleges and systems nationwide: More transparent routes to good jobs and institutional structures that make skills-based, learner-centered design the norm.

A key snippet from the o-ed:

We enlisted the nonprofit Education Design Lab to help us design a process to collaborate authentically with local employers, regional industries, and state agencies. …

This engagement was critical because it helped bring to the table the right people with the right information about the labor market. Together, we designed new programs to meet local and regional labor market demand and help our students access good jobs in high-wage, high-demand fields.

The collaboration has already led to the launch of two significant new health care programs that will go a long way toward meeting the tremendous community demand for nurses and behavioral health specialists.

Thanks to Bobby Pace and Jennifer Dale, who wrote this May 14, 2026, op-ed in Higher Ed Dive: Why colleges should embrace program depth over breadth

GO DEEPER: The Colorado Community College System partnered with Education Design Lab to design a statewide, stackable, skills-based education model in behavioral health. In this Impact by Design Brief, we dive deep into Colorado’s journey to understand how they did it: Building a New Stackable Pathway into the Behavioral Health Workforce: Colorado’s Community College Innovation

It’s the learner voice, according to Dr. Janet Spriggs, president of Forsyth Technical Community College in North Carolina.

In her op-ed published by CCDaily earlier this month, Dr. Spriggs explains how their human-centered design work with the Lab has not only shifted their approach to program design, but inspired a “cultural transformation.”

“By designing a program with students — not just with students in mind — Forsyth Tech developed new approaches that more than doubled our completion rate and better serve our students,” she writes.

Forsyth’s mindset shift started with a project focused on dual enrollment pathways but expanded to redesigning attendance policies, their approach to childcare, and multimodal learning options.

She explains more in the op-ed: Student voice: The most important factor in institutional design.

BTW, in this recent video podcast by the Presidents Forum, Dr. Spriggs talked in depth about why she joined the Lab’s Reimagining Community Colleges Design Challenge … and how Forsyth is undergoing “whole college transformation” through a collaborative process that results in stackable pathways and stronger employer partnerships.

Thank you, Dr. Spriggs and the whole Forsyth community for your inspiring example of learner-centered transformation in action!

In this July 2025 CCDaily op-ed, Education Design Lab CEO Lisa Larson outlines the path forward with Workforce Pell and shares an inspiring example of collaborative work already underway with the Colorado Community College System.

In this April 2025 Q&A interview with C-SPAN, Lab founder and board chair Kathleen deLaski talked about her book, Who Needs College Anymore?

Watch the one-hour video interview on C-SPAN’s website. An audio-only version is available on YouTube (above).

Beyond specifics about the book, Kathleen was asked about her own career path, which included reporting for ABC News, spokesperson for the Pentagon, and political journalism in the early days of AOL (one of her favorite times).

Kathleen is currently teaching a design thinking class at George Mason University. In one of our favorite clips, she talks about the skills design thinking can help build. Can you guess which skills those might be? Watch the 30-second clip.

The interview is also available as a podcast across multiple platforms.

The Lab is excited to share an April 2025 story by Stand Together, which explains why “nearly every industry should be paying attention” to the work the Lab and our partners are getting started in Texas.

The Lab’s Texas Flywheel Initiative is an employer-led effort focused on creating skills-based pathways to careers in the current and emerging Texas digital economy — including data centers, bitcoin mines, their construction, and the infrastructure needed to power them.

From the story:

Dr. Leah Ben-Ami, senior ecosystem designer at Education Design Lab, estimates that a single data center can employ anywhere from 50 to 150 full-time employees. These roles span every phase of a data center’s lifecycle — from construction (requiring electricians, plumbers, and HVAC technicians) to operations (demanding tech-focused expertise in cybersecurity, data science, IT, engineering, and management) to long-term maintenance and expansion (which may call for employees specialized in energy infrastructure and construction).

Many of these jobs don’t require a four-year college degree. Certifications (such as OSHA HAZWOPER), targeted skills training (like the short-term tech courses from Per Scholas), and hands-on apprenticeships can all equip workers for these roles.

The “dream,” Ben-Ami said, is for employees to get hired through these alternative, skills-focused pathways and learn and develop new abilities on the job, allowing them to advance.

“How cool would it be if the people who built your data centers were retained and then maintained the site they helped build?” she said.

While the story focuses on the booming digital economy in Texas — where it currently has the second-largest concentration of data centers in the country — it also notes the implications of creating a skills-based ecosystem model that can extend well beyond tech and AI.

Read the story: Why are 100,000 new jobs opening up in the U.S.?