First-of-its-kind transformation project led by Education Design Lab will help forward-thinking institutions better align with the demands of both employers and learners in a fast-changing, skills-driven labor market
WASHINGTON, D.C. — July 16, 2026 — Five community colleges across the country today announced the next phase of a groundbreaking initiative aimed at designing the future of education to better respond to the needs of an increasingly dynamic and AI-driven economy.
Led by Education Design Lab and with support from ECMC Foundation, the five participating institutions — Rio Salado College (AZ), Saint Paul College (MN), Forsyth Technical Community College (NC), Cuyahoga Community College (OH), and Lone Star College-Tomball (TX) — are launching uniquely designed plans, tailored to the context of their region and the needs of their learners, to accelerate career mobility for their students and graduates while also building stronger and more resilient local economies.
“Too often, higher ed institutions focus their strategic planning processes on answering the question ‘how do we get better at what we already do,’ and then the plans themselves end up collecting dust,” said Dr. Lisa Larson, CEO of Education Design Lab. “These five colleges have spent the year asking a harder set of questions: what do our learners and our communities actually need from us, and how must we change to meet those needs? Each institution has now built a plan that reflects that ambitious vision, and the coming year will enable them to show what community colleges can do when they’re designed around the learners they serve and the economies in which they operate.”
The next phase in this effort, known as the Reimagining Community Colleges Design Challenge, comes at a pivotal moment of cultural and economic transformation that is creating new opportunities for community colleges. With recent data from the World Economic Forum indicating that nearly 40% of core skills in many industries will change by 2030, a growing number of institutions are working to better align their programs with the needs of a fast-changing economy. Community colleges, which have long played a role as drivers of regional economic growth, are uniquely positioned to support that shift: After more than a decade of decline, community college enrollment grew 3% in the fall of 2025, driven in part by growing interest from both employers and learners in shorter-form, career-aligned learning opportunities.
Against that backdrop, the Education Design Lab launched the design challenge with funding from MacKenzie Scott’s Yield Giving to help community colleges respond to the needs of both the labor market and their learners. The initiative is grounded in the Lab’s Future of Learning framework — a set of five design questions developed in 2023 that participating colleges use to shape their transformation plans — and pairs that framework with human-centered design principles and a multi-year commitment to implementation, engaging students, faculty, and employers as co-designers and supporting colleges through the cultural and operational changes that institutional transformation requires.
After one year, all five colleges have completed transformation plans that reflect their own contexts but share a common shift: Designing around learner experience and employer demand rather than institutional structures. Collectively, these plans position colleges to prepare learners for a dynamic future of work.
Highlights from transformation plans across the cohort include:
Saint Paul College (MN): Reimagining the student experience to focus on purpose, identity, and the visibility of skills. Rather than measuring success only through degree completion, Saint Paul will focus on ensuring that every student understands the value of what they are learning and can communicate it with confidence. Full plan.
Forsyth Technical Community College (NC): Moving beyond traditional enrollment and completion metrics toward an approach grounded in economic mobility. Rather than asking whether students graduate, Forsyth asks whether learning leads to living wages, meaningful careers, and long-term advancement. Full plan.
Cuyahoga Community College / Tri-C (OH): Building an institution-wide operating system for economic and social mobility. Unlike plans that focus primarily on programming or student-facing innovation, Tri-C will build an integrated framework that aligns governance, talent strategy, workforce culture, credentials, and learner outcomes around preparing students for changing labor market demands and lifelong career progression. Full plan.
Lone Star College-Tomball (TX): Translating learning into workforce relevance. Lone Star College-Tomball is moving beyond transcripts toward a model in which students leave the institution with evidence of durable skills, transferable capabilities, and employer-facing language that enables them to secure career opportunities. Full plan.
Rio Salado College (AZ): Designing for the realities of modern learners, with a plan grounded in flexibility, persistence, and re-entry. Rio Salado will provide flexible, technology-enabled pathways that support continuous enrollment, stackable credentials, adult learner re-engagement, and multiple entry and exit points, enabling learners to upskill and reskill throughout their careers. Full plan.
Following completion of each strategic plan, the colleges now move from design into implementation, focused on aligning teams, testing new approaches and strategies, and measuring progress towards ambitious goals.
The Reimagining Community Colleges (RCC) Design Challenge builds on the Lab’s Community College Growth Engine (Growth Engine), which has engaged 120 colleges in designing more than 300 micro-pathways that not only result in high-demand programs but also lead to a ripple effect of institutional change that enables institutions to scale skills-based pathways. The Lab plans to document and share insights from across the five colleges to inform the broader community college field. Findings from the initiative will build on the Lab’s growing body of research and design tools aimed at helping institutions adapt to the workforce and learner needs of the next decade.
Building on this inaugural cohort of five institutions, the Lab will launch the next phase of RCC in early 2027 with initial support from Google.org: A competitive national opportunity for a state or system of community colleges to participate in a two-year transformation effort that applies the Future of Learning framework to advance a scalable model for preparing learners for the future of work while strengthening institutional capacity for continuous innovation and improvement. Colleges and partners interested in learning more can visit eddesignlab.org.
“ECMC Foundation’s North Star goal is to help learners earn postsecondary credentials and degrees that will give them the best chance for economic and social mobility,” said Jacob Fraire, President, ECMC Foundation. “This initiative — a partnership of the Education Design Lab and five community colleges — illustrates the critical importance of focusing on the specific needs of learners, especially those farthest from opportunity. When we work together — nonprofits, postsecondary education, and philanthropy — good things can happen for all of our students.”
“We are reshaping higher education so that it truly works for the students we serve,” said Dee Dee Peaslee, President of Saint Paul College. “This requires making learning visible, connecting it more directly to the roles our students will play as workers and community members while ensuring every student can see and communicate the value of their education. That’s how we strengthen the pathway between college and the future our students are working to build.”
“At Forsyth Tech, partnering with the Lab on the Reimagining Community Colleges initiative helped us go beyond asking whether students graduate, and start asking whether they thrive,” said Janet Spriggs, President of Forsyth Tech Community College. “This work is about making sure every credential we award translates into a living wage, a real career, and room to grow; and you’ll see that reflected in our current strategic movement, Vision 2030.”
“Working with the Education Design Lab has been the secret sauce to advancing an ambitious, innovative approach to measuring student success,” said Lee Ann Nutt, President of Lone Star College-Tomball. “Without the Lab’s guidance, we would not have accomplished as much as we have this first year. Identifying durable skills is the easy part. Providing students with a tangible measurement of the achievement of those critical skills, beyond GPA, that employers actually recognize, is a far more complex undertaking. With the help of the Lab, we will soon give employers greater confidence in hiring our graduates and help students get to where they want to be.”
“At Cuyahoga Community College, working with Education Design Lab has helped us advance the pillars of our Vision 2030 Strategic Transformation Plan, the north star of which is facilitating the economic mobility of our students by preparing them for thriving-wage careers,” said Michael Baston, President of Cuyahoga Community College. “People in our region want education that leads to skills, credentials, jobs and mobility.”
“As the world changes at a rapid pace, community colleges must be agile and adaptive in meeting the evolving needs of learners, employers and future leaders. At Rio Salado College, our reimagining work is about more than improving a single system. It is about rethinking how higher education and postsecondary learning happen so we can remain flexible, responsive and prepared for what comes next,” said Kate Smith, President of Rio Salado College. Through the Lab’s process, we are gathering voices from across our community — including learners, employees and business partners — and working with subject matter experts to reimagine how we teach, support and engage every learner, thoughtfully integrating evolving technologies to expand access and better meet the needs of those we serve.”
About Education Design Lab
Education Design Lab (the Lab) is a national nonprofit and intermediary with a mission to co-design an inclusive, skills-based learn-and-work system that facilitates upward economic mobility and closes opportunity gaps for the New Majority Learner. Our facilitated design process helps employer and education stakeholder groups co-design and launch scalable, skills-based education-to-work pathways that align talent supply and demand. Learn more: www.eddesignlab.org
