resources
Multiplier Effect of Impact Investing
The Multiplier Effect of Impact Investing — for every $1 of seed investment by philanthropies to the Education Design Lab’s Community College Growth Engine, participating community colleges were able to unlock $8 in public and private funding to advance micro-pathways.
This has helped colleges secure additional resources and design pathways to access major public funding streams, including federal Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, or WIOA, and the upcoming workforce Pell grant.
Micro-Pathways, Macro Impact
Micro-Pathways, Macro Impact offers a meta-analysis of four independent evaluations of Education Design Lab’s Community College Growth Engine program between 2021 to 2024, showing how the micro-pathways design process is leading to a ripple effect of institutional changes that better align education toward the future of work.
The Lab’s human-centered design approach drives four key types of change:
1. Innovation and change capacity
2. Policies and practice changes
3. Deeper relationships
4. Mindset shifts
Colorado’s Community College Innovation
The Colorado Community College System (CCCS) partnered with Education Design Lab to center learners and employers in designing a statewide, stackable, skills-based education model in behavioral health.
In this November 2025 Impact by Design Brief, we dive deep into Colorado’s journey to understand how they did it … and why it matters.
Building Capacity for Innovation Across Montana's Community College System
Montana’s Year-to-Career (Y2C) initiative, a collaborative effort between Education Design Lab, the Montana University System, Montana’s Office of the Commissioner of Higher Education, and community colleges, represents a significant undertaking to address the state’s evolving workforce needs.
In this Impact by Design brief, we show how the process of designing micro-pathways, when facilitated through human-centered methods, can build institutional and system capacity.
Why Non-Degree Data Needs a Redesign
This brief draws on three years of experience from the Lab’s Data Coaches, three of whom are authors of this piece. Over that time, the team coached dozens of community colleges as they worked to collect, report, and make sense of data on short-term, non-degree programs.
Their insights and recommendations for the field reflect not a single implementation, but recurring patterns observed across institutions as they tried to build data practices in a space that was never designed to be measured.
