Redesigning Community Colleges for Completion: Lessons from Research on High-Performance Organizations

In order to increase rates of student completion on a large scale, community colleges will have to make fundamental changes in the way they operate. This Brief summarizes a literature review that examined research on practices of highly effective organizations in order to provide evidence-based recommendations for community college reform. The Brief describes eight practices that are characteristic of high-performance organizations and presents evidence that these practices have the greatest effect on performance when implemented in concert with one another and aligned to achieve organizational goals. The author then recommends concrete steps that community colleges can take to engage employees in the process of reforming organizational policies and practices. The Brief concludes by describing a model for continuous improvement, whereby colleges measure student learning and progression to ensure that policies and practices support goals for student learning outcomes

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

This report is designed to help improve transfer student outcomes by helping institutional leaders and policymakers better understand current outcomes and providing them with metrics for benchmarking their performance. The authors 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. They 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. Using a rich set of data from the National Student Clearinghouse on more than 700,000 degree-seeking students who first enrolled in community college in 2007, the authors calculated the average outcomes on these measures six years after these students entered college. Performance on all measures varied widely across individual institutions and states. Institutional characteristics were not strongly correlated with student outcomes at community colleges, suggesting that institutions that serve transfer students well can have better-than-expected outcomes even if they have relatively few resources or more disadvantaged students. Among four-year institutions, transfer students had better outcomes at public institutions, very selective institutions, and institutions with higher socioeconomic status students. Lower income transfer students had worse outcomes than higher income students on almost all measures, though in a few states, the success gap between lower and higher income students was small or nonexistent

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

Early Momentum Metrics: Why They Matter for College Improvement

In this brief, the authors propose three measures of “early momentum” that colleges can use to gauge whether institutional reforms are improving student outcomes: 1. Credit momentum—defined as attempting at least 15 semester credits in the first term or at least 30 semester credits in the first academic year. 2. Gateway momentum—defined as taking and passing pathway-appropriate college-level math and college-level English in the first academic year. 3. Program momentum—defined as taking and passing at least nine semester credits in the student’s field of study in the first academic year. Research is beginning to show that these near-term metrics predict long-term success. In addition, these metrics focus attention on initial conditions at colleges that are particularly important for solidifying the foundation for student success. The authors discuss in detail the evidence supporting these metrics and how using early momentum metrics can help colleges reframe and focus reform efforts in positive ways

Early Momentum Metrics: Leading Indicators for Community College Improvement

As community colleges across the country implement large-scale reforms to improve student success, they need timely and actionable metrics to determine if the changes they are making in a given year or term will likely improve student outcomes in the long run. In this brief, the authors examine how well nine measures of students’ progress in their first year predict student completion in subsequent years, and thus how suitable these early momentum metrics are as leading indicators of the effectiveness of institutional reforms. Based on analysis of student data from all community colleges in three states, the authors find that early momentum metrics do predict longer term success for students. They also find that a key factor in low completion rates, as well as in equity gaps in completion rates, is that many students do not gain early momentum in their first year. College outcomes would be substantially higher if more students met early momentum metrics. These findings indicate the need for comprehensive reforms to community college organization and practice to help more students gain early momentum on their way to earning a credential

Is It Really Cheaper to Start at a Community College? The Consequences of Inefficient Transfer for Community College Students Seeking Bachelor’s Degrees

For many students who intend to complete a bachelor’s degree, the savings from starting their undergraduate education at a community college is a major factor in their college choice. Yet, given inefficiencies in pathways through college and in the credit transfer process, initially attending a two-year college may be a false economy. In this paper we investigate whether it is more efficient for students to start at a two-year or four-year college if their intent is to complete a bachelor’s degree. We use data from two state systems, including term-by-term course-level information with matching student demographics and degree records on entering cohorts of students at each state’s public two- and four-year institutions. We combine these data with cost and tuition data to estimate the relative efficiency of starting at a two-year versus a four-year college. We find that the optimal choice about where to start varies across a number of dimensions: low rates of credit transfer are important, but the most salient factor is the diversionary effect of two-year colleges on ever transferring to a four-year college. Sensitivity testing and break-even analyses illustrate how findings vary across student pathways

The Potential of Community Colleges as Bridges to Opportunity for the Disadvantaged: Can it be Achieved on a Large Scale?

Community colleges are receiving increased attention from policy groups and funders concerned with alleviating poverty because of their potential for expanding access by disadvantaged individuals to post-secondary education and careers. To many in community college world, this attention may seem curious, since most community colleges have long served disadvantaged students. In fact, many if not most of the millions of students community colleges serve each year face at least some barriers to success in education and employment. It is precisely because community colleges serve such large numbers of disadvantaged students that they are receiving so much attention. This interest is piqued in part by frustration among many in the anti-poverty field of the relatively small scale of efforts successful in enabling working poor individuals to advance to jobs that pay family-supporting wages. The central argument is that most community colleges fail to fully realize their bridging potential for two main reasons. First, many find it difficult to make the connections – between remedial and college-credit programs, between academic and occupational degree programs and between degree programs and jobs – that are necessary for creating pathways of advancement for disadvantaged students. Second, it is obviously expensive to serve disadvantaged students and yet community colleges tend to be poorly funded. In the hierarchy of community college programs, those that serve disadvantaged students are the least well funded. As a result, many community colleges opt to focus their limited resources on serving more advantaged students in programs popular with employers and policy makers, rather than to risk serving students whose success is by no means assured

A Short Guide to "Tipping Point" Analyses of Community College Student Labor Market Outcomes

This guide is designed for community colleges and community college state agencies that are interested in analyzing the labor market outcomes of their programs and identifying opportunities for improving employment outcomes of their students

What Community College Management Practices are Effective in promoting Student Success? A Study of High- and Low-Impact Institutions

This study identifies community college management practices that promote student success. Using transcript-level data on over 150,000 Florida community college students, we estimated the effect on the graduation, transfer, and persistence rates of minority students at each of the 28 Florida community colleges as a proxy for institutional effectiveness. We ranked the colleges based on these estimated effects and selected six colleges for field research. We found that the high-impact colleges were more likely than the low-impact colleges to coordinate their programs and services to support student success. We also found that minority students were generally more successful in colleges that had support services targeted specifically to their needs.The study suggests that a critical factor for institutional effectiveness is how well a college manages and aligns its programs and services to support student success