At 8:31 a.m. this morning, an email from Dr. Aarti Dhupelia hit our inboxes with news worth spreading on College Decision Day: One Million Degrees has signed a new five-year agreement with City Colleges of Chicago to scale its “wraparound support” model to more than 3,000 scholars a year.

Here’s why that’s a big deal. A decade-long randomized controlled trial by the University of Chicago’s Inclusive Economy Lab found that OMD participants were 73% more likely to earn an associate degree within three years and earned an average of $14,246 more per year seven years after enrollment. In the world of higher education, those kinds of results are rare.

And it isn’t a one-off.

April was National Community College Month, and the sector is making waves:

  • Campus President Michael Zimmerman‘s column in Inside Higher Ed offered useful how-to for receiving institutions, hot on the heels of the announcement that Campus, which is scaling a student success model based on CUNY ASAP’s pioneering work, has launched a new national transfer network of more than 30 four year institutions. (If you want to go deeper on transfer solutions, don’t miss Bruno Manno’s recent piece.)
  • On Tuesday, the California Community Colleges system and National University announced a two-year-to-online-bachelor’s transfer pathway—guaranteed admission and a 46% tuition discount for any student who completes an associate degree for transfer.
  • A few weeks earlier, City College of San Francisco announced a partnership with Uwill to bring 24/7/365 basic needs support to its 42,000 students—the kind of investment that the Real College California survey suggests is long overdue: Two-thirds of California community college students face at least one form of basic needs insecurity, with 58% experiencing food insecurity, and 20% reporting that they have experienced homelessness.

Underneath the stream of announcements, the policy machinery in Washington is moving. The Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization (AIM) negotiated rulemaking committee has been reviewing transfer credit policy this spring, including how to push receiving institutions to boost the number of transfer credits they accept.

That sort of federal action reflects a groundswell of opposition to the college-transfer-status-quo. Earlier this spring, our team led a confidential message-testing project for a new initiative working to close the transfer divide. The takeaway (with specifics stripped out): higher ed leaders, state policymakers, and practitioners agree the status quo isn’t working, and the appetite for change is real.

That sort of consensus could not come at a better time. As Aarti explained in a recent op-ed for Community College Daily: “Community colleges are not a fallback. They are a bold first choice.”

A closing thought: Regardless of what you or I think, students are voting with their feet. Last year, public two-year enrollment grew 4%, with career-focused certificate programs up 6.6%. Perhaps as more people in positions of influence and power see their own kids and family members choose community college first, the narrative that surrounds them will begin to evolve.

This article is sourced from Whiteboard Notes, our weekly newsletter of the latest education policy and industry news read by thousands of education leaders, investors, grantmakers, and entrepreneurs. Subscribe here.