The Transfer Playbook: Essential Practices For Two- And Four-year Colleges

Recognizing the critical need to help millions of community college students failed by current transfer practices and policies.  A new report provides a detailed guide for two- and four-year colleges on how to improve bachelor's degree outcomes for students who start at community college.Every year, millions of students aiming to attain a bachelor's degree attend community colleges because of their affordability and accessibility. Most will not realize their goals. While the vast majority of students report they want to earn a bachelor's degree, only 14 percent of degree-seeking students achieve that goal within six years, according to recent research from CCRC, Aspen, and the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The odds are worse for low-income students, first-generation college students, and students of color—those most likely to start at a community college

Recruiting Lower-Income Women into Information Technology Careers: Building a Foundation for Action

This report makes the case for encouraging more low-wage women to consider careers in information technology. It assesses women's knowledge and perceptions about the IT field and establishes a framework to promote opportunities in IT. More reports like this one are available on WE's website under Media Center > Publications > Expanding Career Options

Community College Management Practices That Promote Student Success

This Brief summarizes a study by the Community College Research Center of community college management practices that promote student success. This study addresses the limitations of previous research on the effectiveness of undergraduate institutions in several ways. It takes advantage of a rich set of longitudinal student unit record data to control for the individual characteristics of the students that the colleges serve. Because the study is based on the outcomes of both full-time and part-time students, our measure of institutional effectiveness is better suited to community colleges and their students than is the National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES) “student-right-to-know” measure commonly used by other studies. We also measured student persistence in addition to completion and transfer, which is appropriate given that community college students often take a long time to complete their programs or to transfer. Our sample is confined to all community colleges in a single state, thus eliminating the effects on institutional performance of variations in public policy and institutional mission, practice, and resources across states

Tracking Transfer: New Measures of Institutional and State Effectiveness in Helping Community College Students Attain Bachelor's Degrees

Increasing the effectiveness of two- to four-year college transfer is critical for meeting national goals for college attainment and promoting upward social mobility. Efforts to improve institutional effectiveness in serving transfer students and state transfer policy have been hampered by a lack of comparable metrics for measuring transfer student outcomes. In this report, we propose a common set of metrics for measuring the effectiveness of two- and four-year institutions in enabling degree-seeking students who start college at a community college to transfer to four-year institutions and earn bachelor's degrees. These include three community college measures -- transfer-out rate, transfer-with-award rate, and transfer-out bachelor's completion rate -- and one measure for four-year institutions -- transfer-in bachelor's completion rate. We also examine a fifth measure: the overall rate at which the cohort of students who start at a community college in a given state go on to earn a bachelor's degree from a four-year institution. In the conclusion of the report, we discuss implications for institutional leaders and policymakers and identify areas for further research

Not Just Math and English: Courses That Pose Obstacles to Community College Completion

Discussions of the barriers to completion in community colleges have largely focused on student success in introductory college-level math and English courses, and rightfully so, since these courses are typically required for degrees. However, there is a much broader range of courses that also serve as “gatekeepers” in the sense that they are obstacles to completion. This paper offers methods for identifying these courses and for assessing the relative extent of the obstacle to completion each of them poses. We compare the performance in these courses of students who successfully completed a credential with those who did not. We find that the difficulty students experience in succeeding in many other introductory courses is just as great as that posed by college math and English. If colleges want to reduce impediments to graduation, they therefore need to look at a broader range of courses than just math and English and devise strategies for improving student achievement in these courses as well. We also find that overall GPA in college courses is a stronger predictor of completion than performance in any one course. This suggests that colleges need to monitor students’ overall performance to identify those who are in danger of not completing and design academic and non-academic interventions to help them succeed. Conversely, colleges need also to identify students who did well in these obstacle courses but have dropped out, so that they can encourage them to continue. It also suggests that remedial instruction, which is typically focused on math and English, should be rethought and its scope broadened

The Value of Student Right-to-Know Data in Assessing Community College Performance

Traditionally, community colleges were judged on their number of enrollments and their ability to provide postsecondary education to a wide variety of students. Recently, however, state and federal policymakers have become increasingly concerned with student outcomes, and some states have even begun to consider linking the funding of community colleges to their performance on student outcome measures. In 1990, Congress passed the Student Right-to- Know (SRK) and Campus Security Act. It requires that all colleges report graduation rates to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in order for their students to receive federal financial aid. These Student Right-to-Know graduation rates are part of the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). The SRK rates are the only performance measures available for virtually every undergraduate institution in the nation, including community colleges, but critics assert that the rates understate the success of community colleges in several important ways

Do Student Success Courses Actually Help Community College Students Succeed?

Many first-time college students arrive on campus unprepared to succeed in college. This is especially the case at community colleges, which pursue an “open door” mission of serving all students, regardless of prior educational background. According to a survey of degree-granting institutions by the National Center for Education Statistics (2003), 42 percent of entering first-time students at public two-year colleges in fall 2000 took at least one remedial course (or one “developmental” course; we use these terms interchangeably), compared to 20 percent of entering students at public four-year institutions. Among recent high school graduates who entered higher education through community colleges in the mid-1990s, over 60 percent took at least one remedial course (authors’ calculations based on the National Education Longitudinal Survey of 1988 [NELS: 88]). Underpreparation is typically viewed in terms of deficiencies in students’ basic academic skills, specifically in those skills integral to the reading, writing, and mathematics subject areas. Community college educators maintain, however, that many entering students are also unprepared in other important ways. It is widely believed that many students have poor study habits and lack clear goals for college and careers. Some experts contend that helping students address these non-academic deficiencies is just as important as helping them acquire basic academic skills through remedial classes, which typically do not address issues such as study skills, goal setting, and the like (Boylan, 2002;Pascarella and Terenzini, 1991)

Building a Culture of Evidence for Community College Student Success: Early Progress in the Achieving the Dream Initiative

Achieving the Dream is a multiyear, national initiative, launched by Lumina Foundation for Education, to help community college students stay in school and succeed. The 82 participating colleges commit to collecting and analyzing data to improve student outcomes, particularly for low-income students and students of color. This baseline report describes the early progress that the first 27 colleges have made after just one year of implementation

New Evidence of Success for Community College Remedial English Students: Tracking the Outcomes of Students in the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP)

This paper presents the findings from a follow-up quantitative analysis of the Community College of Baltimore County’s Accelerated Learning Program (ALP). Our results suggest that among students who enroll in the highest level developmental writing course, participation in ALP is associated with substantially better outcomes in terms of English 101 completion and English 102 completion (college-level English courses), which corroborates the results of a similar analysis completed in 2010. These results were consistent, and in some cases, even stronger, when we used propensity score matching. Moreover, using a larger number of cohorts and tracking students over a longer period of time, we also found that ALP students were more likely to persist to the next year than non-ALP students. Specific subgroup analyses for earlier versus later cohorts, as well as for Black and low-income students, revealed relationships between ALP participation and student outcomes that were similar to those found in the larger sample, although ALP appeared to be more effective for White and high-income students on some outcomes. Finally, we compared college-ready students enrolled in ALP sections of English 101 with their counterparts in wholly college-ready sections, and found that those in ALP sections had equivalent performance within English 101 itself, but slightly lower subsequent college-level course enrollment and completion