Johnson County Community College continuously seeks to respond to the current and emerging needs of the community by providing high-quality educational programs and student and community services that are accessible to all who can benefit from them. After six years of implementing guided pathways, JCCC sought out the remaining piece to the puzzle: a system to bring it all together in one place for students and administrators. JCCC is now committed to providing every incoming student with a pathway to success, not just those who seek help from their advisor.

“Every student deserves a pathway – not just the students that come and ask us for one," said Alex Wells, Assistant Dean of Counseling Services. “We wanted a user-friendly way to show students their plan from start to finish.”

As the largest community college in Kansas with over 35,000 students enrolled each semester, JCCC turned to Stellic to help automate and scale individualized guided pathways. The implementation of Stellic will allow JCCC students and staff to work together to dynamically create educational plans as seamlessly as possible, while ensuring every student has the ability to graduate and/or transfer to a 4-year institution in the least amount of time and investment possible.

Why JCCC chose to implement Stellic’s Academic Planning Software technology

After weighing a number of solutions for their needs, JCCC ultimately chose to partner with Stellic because of Stellic’s founding story and mission-driven approach. 

“A lot of people [at JCCC] really liked why and how Stellic was built. We liked the story of Sabih’s own confusion in working with the US higher ed system and how [Stellic] was built from a student’s perspective.” said Alex Wells.

The platform is built to support academic pathways and enhance the advising model in a way that proactively engages today’s students. JCCC found a number of modern features in the platform to be evidence of this. One example was the way in which an onboarding survey can enable JCCC students to find elective courses based on their interests. Another was the dynamic and comprehensive communication features that provide one user-friendly interface for students and staff to streamline their collaboration.

How Stellic is helping JCCC create effective systems and pathways for every student

Enabling exploration for students customized by population

In keeping with their 2025 strategic goals, JCCC has developed a mandatory orientation for first-time students customized by population. Stellic will support this initiative through dynamic course search capabilities that will make recommendations based on co-curricular criteria including internships, jobs, and other out-of-classroom activities that vary from student to student.

Supporting students with clear, visible academic pathways

It’s common amongst community colleges like JCCC for there to be an incredibly diverse student population with near limitless pathways and options that depend on each student and their background. Stellic will provide a dynamic platform for students to plan and visualize different pathways, and create multiple plans to understand which journey makes most sense for them. The student may be undeclared, for example, and use Stellic to plug in their interests and completed requirements in order to view their possible pathways, how long they will take and what is required to complete them. A student intending to transfer can use Stellic to seamlessly explore transfer equivalencies and run searches on how their courses will transfer at other institutions in order to build a transfer pathway that works best for their situation.

Ensuring successful outcomes with an enhanced academic advising model

Using a shared responsibility model, students will both be empowered to manage their academic pathway while having the support of their advisors in an even more collaborative manner. With a shared view of their plan and communication tool, Stellic makes it easy for students to collaborate with their advisors, but throughout their journey students will have access to key points of visibility such as seat availability, number of students on waitlists, and course modality so that they can be sure they are not falling behind.

JCCC and their goals for Stellic’s Academic Planning Software

With the adoption of Stellic, JCCC’s hope is to modernize academic pathways by equipping students with effective tools for academic planning that engage and support their success, both towards graduation and beyond.

“We are all excited here at JCCC - we know this is something we need to do - the research shows having all students on a pathway helps and we need to do this for our students. We’re excited to move forward.” - Alex Wells, Assistant Dean of Counseling Services.