Building a Bridge to Bakersfield College

The challenge

Bakersfield College needed to convert a brief summer intensive into a scalable onboarding experience that delivered measurable gains in persistence, transfer-level course completion, and degree attainment for first-time and returning students.

Our approach

Working in long-term partnership with WRD, BC leveraged federal Title V Hispanic-Serving Institutions Program funding to redesign Bridge to BC — evolving it from a two-week summer intensive academy into a one-day, in-person onboarding program that prepares students academically, socially, and personally for college, with academic advising, financial aid guidance, and skills workshops integrated end-to-end.

Outcomes

• Bridge to BC participants consistently outperform peers in persistence, course success, degree completion, and transfer rates
• In 2023, the program served 2,921 students — 38.7% of incoming students
• Participants are significantly more likely to complete transfer-level math and English in their first year
• Higher credit momentum, persistence, and completion rates than non-participants
• Bakersfield College has scaled the program's impact and secured additional federal grants to expand educational opportunities since inception

Bakersfield College (BC), one of California’s oldest community colleges, serves over 45,000 students annually. Recognized nationally for its student success initiatives, BC has used federal Title V Part A: Developing Hispanic-Serving Institutions Program (DHSI) funding to address institutional barriers and improve student outcomes. The Bridge to BC initiative is a defining example of how federal grant funding, combined with a deliberate institutional commitment to student success, produces measurable, durable impact.

The program’s design recognizes that the first weeks of college often determine the trajectory of a student’s persistence and completion. Bridge to BC condenses what most institutions handle through scattered orientation touchpoints — academic advising, financial aid information, study-skills workshops, social orientation — into a single coordinated onboarding experience. The structure is deliberate: enough depth to make a difference, enough brevity to scale to nearly forty percent of incoming students.

The outcomes are visible across the metrics that matter for community college students. Higher rates of completion in transfer-level math and English in the first year. Stronger credit momentum and persistence. Higher degree completion and transfer rates. The data-driven design of the program — and the institutional willingness to fund-and-evaluate-and-iterate — has positioned BC to scale the model and to secure subsequent federal grants that expand the educational opportunity available to its students.