CARA undertakes research to inform our practice & leverages practice to inform research and policy in all of our work.
Research < — > Action
CARA conducts applied research on postsecondary access and success in collaboration with young people, schools, community organizations, and higher education institutions. Our goal is to bring the voices of those most impacted by local, state, and national policies – practitioners & young people – into conversations that shape policy at all of these levels.
Our findings are published in various formats, including policy reports, academic journal articles, blog posts on partner websites, and op-eds in popular news sources. These efforts support our goal of creating more inclusive and equitable practices and policies in the field of postsecondary planning.
Our program models develop an evidence-base, generate insights into where systems have strengths/challenges, establish credibility with stakeholders with a system, and build coalitions aligned around a roadmap for systems change. Our engagement with systems helps shift the conditions that hold a challenge in place in order to enable programming to scale across a system and become embedded, effective, and enduring
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Aligned to our program models, CARA’s research engages with two key areas:
Institutional Change
Starting from the belief that high schools and colleges need to see it as their job to educate young people about postsecondary pathways, CARA explores how institutions and policies can change to better support students through the varied steps to defining and realizing their postsecondary goals. Our research in and with our partner sites provides a critical window into how to create the infrastructure needed to do this work and the specific policies and practices that facilitate and/or hinder progress.
Peer-to-Peer Advising
Starting from the belief that young people who are first-generation, low-income, and/or people of color are an indispensable part of the solution to this country’s counseling crisis, our research examines both the challenges and promising practices related to implementing and scaling a peer-to-peer approach to expanding advising capacity in public institutions. We explore the impact peer-to-peer advising programs have on outcomes for students served and on the postsecondary pathways and career development of peer leaders themselves.