Hi! We are Valerie Malzer, Katie Brendli Brown, Jen Brooks, and Leslie Shaw, extension faculty at Cornell University’s K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Institute on Employment and Disability. We serve as external evaluators of the Inclusive Career Advancement Program (ICAP), an Oregon Vocational Rehabilitation (OVR) initiative funded by the Rehabilitation Services Administration.
Advancing Career Pathways for Community College Students with Disabilities
Higher education is strongly linked to employment success, yet many people with disabilities never pursue postsecondary education. As a result, a significant employment gap persists between people with disabilities and those without disabilities.
To address this challenge, OVR launched ICAP in 2021 to increase participation in community college career pathway programs among vocational rehabilitation (VR)-eligible individuals with disabilities. The project partnered VR counselors with community college career coaches to help students explore careers, enroll in education and training programs, persist through their studies, and obtain employment. Our evaluation supported continuous learning and improvement throughout the project.
Evaluation Supporting Program Improvement
We used multiple methods to assess implementation and outcomes, including surveys of staff and participants, interviews and focus groups with program partners, and quarterly analyses of administrative data. We met monthly with state level leaders to review findings, address challenges, adjust implementation, and highlight promising local practices.
Hot Tip
Evaluation that focuses on frequent, informal conversations about findings can help foster continuous learning and programmatic refinement.
Turning Evaluation Findings into Action
ICAP leadership was willing to use evaluation findings to drive improvement. From the beginning of the project, Oregon VR focused on not only ICAP program outcomes but also necessary agency-wide changes to support post-secondary education experiences and outcomes for VR clients after ICAP.
Hot Tip
Evaluation data can help guide systems change within an organization, such as through identifying strengths and weaknesses as well as providing evidence to guide data-based decision making.
Several key changes emerged from this process:
Revising Higher Education Policy Across Oregon
The VR policy on higher education effectively discouraged VR counselors from creating education plans with clients. Thus, OVR formally revised this policy statewide, empowering individual counselors and clients to make decisions about education and training opportunities that aligned with career goals.
Streamlining Eligibility and Referrals
Leadership reduced the VR eligibility determination timeline for ICAP participants from up to 90 days to no more than two weeks, enabling participants to access services and begin planning for their educational goals much more quickly.
Clarifying Roles and Responsibilities
Staff from both VR and community colleges reported uncertainty about where their responsibilities began and ended. To address this, ICAP leadership used trainings and meetings to clarify expectations and strengthen partnerships.
Using Data to Drive Recruitment and Outcomes
We identified challenges in meeting participant recruitment targets established by the grant, which led ICAP leadership to develop a data dashboard, using SmartSheets, that tracks recruitment, enrollment, and outcome metrics in real time. By making performance data visible and actionable, the team racked implementation quality and program growth. This dashboard was so effective, it became a model for similar projects in other states.
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