Colleges are a vital gateway to job opportunities and economic advancement, particularly for students from low-income back­grounds and other marginalized communities. To succeed aca­demically and persist through graduation, these students must navigate a series of high-stakes administrative processes—such as enrolling in college, registering for courses, applying for and renewing financial aid, and meeting satisfactory academic progress requirements—to remain eligible for financial aid. Yet these processes are often complex, time sensitive, and burden­some. Research shows that even small challenges—such as confus­ing paperwork or missed deadlines—can lead students to delay enrollment, reduce their course loads, or drop out altogether, which in turn lowers their chances of earning degrees and limits their long-term earnings and job prospects. Students benefit when these processes are clear, streamlined, and supported with timely guidance.

MDRC’s On the Path to a Degree (OnPath) initiative partners with colleges to address persistent challenges students face with enrolling in college, securing financial aid, and meeting academic benchmarks, with the goal of increasing student persistence so that college can lead to good jobs and upward economic mobility for more students. In June 2025, OnPath 2.0 (the second OnPath project) introduced a suite of financial aid tools, enrollment guides, and exercises—the “inter­ventions”—at Central Washington University in Washington and Hudson County Community College in New Jersey. Designed to streamline the enrollment, registration, and financial aid pro­cesses; clarify the connection between academic performance and financial aid eligibility; and promote the use of campus support services, these interventions are being implemented throughout the 2025-2026 academic year.

To ensure that students would find the interventions relevant and usable, the MDRC team worked with college staff members and students to codesign and launch intervention materials. This brief describes early lessons and insights the MDRC team gleaned while developing and testing prototypes of student-facing resources, pilot testing these materials to quickly identify the most promising approaches, elevating student voices to inform improvements, and building cross-functional implementation teams—comprising college staff members from different departments—to work together to coordinate and sustain new ways to support students.