Zach Pardos is Using Machine Learning to Broaden Pathways from Community College

UC Berkeley Assistant Professor Zachary Pardos and his team have developed a machine learning approach that promises to help more community college students position themselves to transfer and succeed at four-year colleges and universities. Along the way, they've discovered that considering course enrollment patterns -- or the classes that students take before, along with, and after a particular course -- can help provide a more complete picture of what courses should "count" when students transfer. Roughly 80% of community college students aim to continue their education at four-year institutions, but the vast majority never make the transfer. Contributing to the problem are the complexities of "articulation," or determining which course at one institution will count for credit at another. This entails assessing the similarity of thousands, or potentially even millions, of pairs of courses, an endeavor that's impossible to comprehensively achieve and keep current across all institutions manually.