Program

Dr. Davis Jenkins is a senior research scholar at the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College. He works with colleges and states across the country to find ways to improve educational and employment outcomes for students, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Jenkins’s research and thinking have informed the development and spread of innovative approaches to improving student success. Together with Thomas Bailey and Shanna Jaggars, he is the author of Redesigning America’s Community Colleges: A Clearer Path to Student Success (Harvard University Press, 2015), which has helped to catalyze the national “guided pathways” reform movement. A key focus of Jenkins’s recent work has been on strategies for improving bachelor’s degree outcomes for students who start at community colleges. Together with John Fink, he authored Tracking Transfer, which provided model metrics and data on transfer outcomes for two- and four-year institutions by institutional type and state. Together with colleagues from the Aspen Institute, Jenkins co-authored the Transfer Playbook, which is based on practices of partnerships of two- and four-year institutions nationally that have better than expected bachelor’s completion rates for students who start at community colleges. He and his colleagues have created self-assessments and other tools that colleges and universities can use to improve their support for transfer students. Davis earned a Ph.D. in public policy analysis from Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelor’s in religion from Princeton University.