The four essential practices of a Guided Pathways model are to:

1. Clarify the path for students
2. Help students choose and enter a path
3. Help students stay on the path
4. Ensure that students are learning

Clear pathways: With guidance from advisors and career counselors, students choose pathways that lead quickly toward certificates or degrees.

Program and degree maps: Faculty map out curriculum and learning outcomes for entire programs. The programs launch students directly into a career with a certificate or two-year degree, or connect them into a university where the students learn more about their chosen fields.

Eliminate or accelerate remediation: Colleges implement strategies that dramatically increase the rate at which students complete college-level English and math in their first year of enrollment.

Enhanced intake and advising practices: Colleges redesign intake, orientation, placement and advising to help entering students choose a path and enroll in a program of study as quickly as possible. This includes required advising on a regular basis, the tracking of student progress, and early alert systems that notify faculty and staff when students falter.

The implementation of Degree Pathways at Highline looks like the diagram below, as we work together to implement the changes above to improve student success and experience.

• Alignment of learning outcomes to labor market and junior level (major ready) competencies for transfer
• Excellent anti-racist, equity-minded pedagogy
• Clear pathways to achieve those outcomes- students know what classes to take when
• Excellent intake and on-boarding processes- fostering a deep sense of belonging for each student
• Informed choices- how students choose a pathway and program
• Holistic supports- how students are supported to stay on a pathway to completion

This requires challenging assumptions and long standing beliefs, practices, and policies, and is an adaptive, transformative institution-wide change process taking place at the colleges.

Guided Pathways is a deliberate and comprehensive framework which supports Highline in meeting our strategic priorities:

1. Completion
2. Increased Learning 
3. Equity Gains
4. Fiscal Effectiveness

It is an institutional mechanism used to achieve equity and builds upon Highline College’s ongoing Equity First Strategic Planning, Strategic Enrollment Management, Mission Fulfillment Report, Assessment Core Competencies, Title III SIP grant and related student success and equity initiatives. All these efforts are interconnected and reinforce one another. 

Executive Cabinet, using feedback from students, faculty and staff, made the decision to call guided pathways, Degree Pathways.  When referring to the framework we will use the term guided pathways, when discussing the pathway work at Highline College we will use Degree Pathways.