(a) There is hereby established the California Community College Guided Pathways Grant Program under the administration of the chancellor’s office. Grants awarded to community colleges pursuant to this part are intended to ensure all of the following:

(1) Integration of existing student-success programs and services.

(2) Building of capacity at community colleges for data analysis, leadership, planning, and implementation related to institutional change.

(3) Development of clearly structured, coherent guided pathways programs for all entering students for purposes of improving student outcomes, reducing time to degree, and increasing the ability of students to obtain high-paying jobs.

(b) The chancellor’s office shall distribute grants, upon appropriation by the Legislature, to community colleges that satisfy the requirements of this part and any programmatic criteria, administrative guidelines, and other requirements developed by the chancellor’s office to implement this part.

(c) For purposes of this part, “chancellor’s office” means the Office of the Chancellor of the California Community Colleges.

(d) For purposes of this part, a “guided pathways program” includes all of the following activities and practices:

(1) Clarifying paths to student end goals by doing all of the following:

(A) Simplifying students’ choices with default program maps developed by faculty and advisors for all academic and vocational programs that show students a clear pathway to completion, further education, and employment in fields of importance to the region.

(B) Providing student advising and support services that help students to transition from high school, explore academic and vocational fields, choose a major, and develop a comprehensive academic plan leading to an associate degree for transfer, a career technical education certificate, an associate degree, other community college certificates, or the satisfaction of university transfer requirements.

(C) Establishing transfer pathways through alignment of pathway courses and expected learning outcomes with transfer institutions, to optimize applicability of community college credits to university majors.

(2) Helping students choose and enter a pathway by doing both of the following:

(A) Bridging K-12 to higher education by ensuring early remediation in the final year of high school.

(B) Redesigning traditional remediation as an “on-ramp” to a program of study, which helps students explore academic and career options from the beginning of their college experience, aligns math and other foundation skills coursework with a student’s program of study, and integrates and contextualizes instruction to build academic and nonacademic foundation skills throughout the college-level curriculum, particularly in program “gateway” courses.

(3) Helping students stay on an academic path by doing both of the following:

(A) Implementing procedures and systems, supported by appropriate technology, to monitor students’ progress toward completing their academic plans, to identify students who are at risk of not progressing in a program, and to intervene promptly with advising and other academic supports to help those students to resume progress or to revise their plans.

(B) Embedding academic and nonacademic supports throughout student programs to promote student learning and persistence.

(4) Ensuring students are learning by all of the following:

(A) Establishing program-level learning outcomes that are aligned with the requirements for success in employment and further education in a given field and applying the results of learning outcomes assessments to improve the effectiveness of instruction across programs.

(B) Integrating group projects, internships, and other applied learning experiences to enhance instruction and student success in courses across programs of study.

(C) Ensuring incorporation of effective teaching practice throughout the pathways.

(Added by Stats. 2017, Ch. 23, Sec. 14. (SB 85) Effective June 27, 2017.)