How KPCC designed a new education beat in the middle of a pandemic

In 2020, KPCC/LAist received an exciting opportunity to launch a new college pathways reporting beat, looking at the many ways people get to higher education and the obstacles that stand in their way. Meanwhile, the coronavirus pandemic was sweeping across the country, creating the biggest disruption to U.S. education in decades.

The UCLA campus. (Chava Sanchez/LAist)

We all know what happened next: school shutdowns, a switch to distance learning, and months of uncertainty. Unemployment surged, hitting almost exclusively those with less than a bachelor’s degree. College plans shifted or went into limbo. Existing equity gaps stretched wider.

This sudden upheaval made the issues of college access and equity more stark than ever, and provided the backdrop against which KPCC/LAist started designing and defining our college pathways beat. Our new college pathways team — reporter Jill Replogle and I — needed to figure out who our target audiences would be and how to provide meaningful content and engagement opportunities for them.

We got to work.

Download the complete report here.

There is a lot to unpack around the journey to higher education. We could look at the experience of getting to college from high school, when students are making their way through the research and application process — or missing opportunities to do so. We could start earlier, in middle or elementary school; some research indicates that reading proficiency in third grade can be a predictor of high school graduation outcomes. We could go into early childhood and family socioeconomic backgrounds, which also affect a person’s trajectory toward higher education. Then there are students who don’t go to college straight from high school — older adults, military veterans, parents of young children, students with full-time jobs. Add on top of that the different dynamics at various types of schools in California — community colleges, CSUs, UCs, private schools, for-profit schools, trade schools — and the many ways that the pandemic has shifted these dynamics.

We had to figure out where the biggest information needs were and how we could best help meet them. We asked ourselves: What do people considering higher education need to know? When do they most need this information? How can we help fill these information gaps?

To start understanding this, we turned to human-centered design, a problem-solving methodology that relies heavily on listening to and understanding the experiences of people who have the most at stake in a given issue. If we have a solid understanding of potential college students’ needs and motivations, then we will be able to design solutions with those insights in mind. KPCC/LAist has used human-centered design twice before, in rethinking our early childhood education beat and the development of our census coverage.

We followed a five-step process:

1. Identify the kinds of people we want to learn from and who have a stake in our future reporting and engagement work
2. Interview these stakeholders
3. Discover needs, develop insights and detect patterns from the interviews
4. Brainstorm content and outreach ideas based on insights and needs
5. Develop prototypes of select ideas

At the heart of this process is listening deeply and learning from the primary stakeholders in our College Pathways reporting — that is, anyone who is considering pursuing higher education — and drawing insights from those conversations to frame our coverage. Essentially, students themselves helped us build this beat.

Here’s a bit more detail about what each step looked like:

Step 1: Identify the kinds of people we want to learn from and who have a stake in our future reporting and engagement work

Anyone considering pursuing higher education — whether they’re seriously thinking of applying or are just curious about what higher education can offer — is a stakeholder in our College Pathways reporting, and that’s a big group of people. We made a list of different perspectives we wanted to learn from: older adults switching careers, undocumented students, veterans, parents of young children, housing insecure students, and more. We divided them into two groups: current college students who could reflect on their experiences getting to college, and those not currently enrolled in college but were considering it (or had considered it in the past).

Step 2: Interview these stakeholders

We ultimately found 16 people to speak with, and had one-hour conversations with each of them over Zoom. These conversations were not traditional journalistic interviews, where questions are direct and precise. Interviews in the human-centered design process are intentionally open-ended as a way to draw out both explicit and implicit needs. Explicit needs are things we can see or can be directly stated; implicit needs lie below the surface and are more embedded in emotions, values, and beliefs.

Many of our interview questions went beyond the idea of college itself, and included things like:

What is your idea of success and what do you need in order to achieve it?
Describe what your day was like yesterday, from the time you woke up until you went to bed.
What immediate decisions are you considering right now?

Step 3: Discover needs, develop insights and detect patterns from the interviews

After listening to 16 people share their very different perspectives and higher education journeys, we had to make sense of it all. With help from design thinking consultant Tran Ha, we drew out insights from each interview and made note of patterns and themes.

Screenshot of how we laid out insights from one interview on the Mural app.

Here are some of the main takeaways we came out with:

1. Potential college students need a way to feel confident and make informed choices about their higher education pathway. There is a plethora of information available about career paths, academic programs, schools, applications and financial aid. But sorting through it all can be extremely confusing and overwhelming. Those thinking about higher education need a way to understand what these choices mean and the costs and benefits associated with them.
2. Those with little to no guidance or support need information the most. Many are navigating this confusing space on their own, without quality information or knowledgeable personal guidance from parents, counselors or mentors. Often these potential college students are not immersed in a college-going environment, and don’t have access to built-in institutional resources like career centers or college advisors. This group encompasses a wide range of people, including would-be first-generation college students, adults looking to move into new careers, and recently arrived immigrants.
3. Information is most unclear in the early stages of higher education decision-making. KPCC/LAist has a strong opportunity to provide information for potential students at the point when they are exploring possibilities for their future and deciding when and whether to apply to higher education. This is the stage when the range of options and tradeoffs in deciding to pursue one avenue over another are especially unclear, and where solid guidance seems particularly scarce.
4. We need to embrace a broad definition of “higher education.” “College” is often a shorthand for a two-year or four-year degree program. But there’s a strong need for information around trade schools, certifications and training programs. We’d be doing a disservice to our audiences by neglecting coverage on non-degree options.

These lessons were hugely valuable. They gave our team a solid understanding of our target audiences’ needs, the parameters of our beat and opportunities available. We had a shared vocabulary with which to move forward with our reporting and engagement work. Additionally, our stakeholder interviews allowed us to think about these bigger themes with real people in mind.

A screenshot from our newsroom’s brainstorming session on the Mural app.

Step 4: Brainstorm content and outreach ideas based on insights and needs

Now that we knew how to focus the beat, we convened people from around the KPCC/LAist newsroom to help brainstorm ways to address our target audiences’ needs. We arranged three sessions and had participants answer questions like: “How might we introduce students to the plethora of different pathway experiences and outcomes?” and “How might we help prospective students weigh the costs and benefits of their higher education choices?”

Step 5: Develop prototypes of select ideas

We ended up with a massive list of ideas and picked three to test:

• A virtual live event where college advisors answer the public’s questions about potential career paths and higher education options;
• Postcards with information about navigating higher education options, distributed at public libraries and job placement centers; and
• A small network of “mentors” in high-demand jobs in the L.A. area who will be available for informal one-on-one chats about the realities of their job, lifestyle, career, and educational pathway.

As we began planning some of these prototypes, we set up a survey asking community members who were considering going back to school or switching careers to tell us about the questions they had. So far we’ve received dozens of responses, with questions like, What additional education is actually useful and will lead to employment? Will there actually be work available for what I want to study? Will I be able to make more money with additional training than without it? How can I work on a degree and pay my bills at the same time?

These questions are more signs that we’ve latched onto a real need for information in our community — and we’re really excited to get started.

Read about our process and prototype ideas in much more detail in our report, College Pathways: How Students Helped Build A New Education Beat. And let us know what you think: blee@scpr.org.