Noncredit Education in Community College: Students, Course Enrollments, and Academic Outcomes

The past two decades have seen a noticeable increase in noncredit instructional offerings in postsecondary education. While noncredit programs have been advocated as a promising way to address educational equity, knowledge about the noncredit sector, such as the types of students enrolled in noncredit courses and their academic outcomes, is sparse. Drawing upon a rich dataset that includes transcript and demographic information on both for-credit and noncredit students in nine community colleges in one state, this study explores the demographic and academic profiles of students enrolled in various fields of noncredit education, their academic outcomes and progress, and potential factors that influence noncredit course completion and transition to the for-credit sector

Early Academic Outcomes for Students of Part-Time Faculty at Community Colleges: How and Why Does Instructors' Employment Status Influence Student Success?

More than half of community college courses are taught by part-time faculty, and the reliance on part-time faculty to teach developmental education courses and gateway math and English courses is even more prevalent. Drawing on data from six community colleges, this study estimates the effects of part-time faculty versus full-time faculty on students’ current and subsequent course outcomes in developmental and gateway courses, using course fixed effects and propensity score matching to minimize bias arising from student self-sorting across and within courses. While students with part-time instructors have better outcomes in their current course and similar pass rates in the next course in the sequence, they are 3 to 5 percentage points less likely to enroll in that subsequent course. The negative effects on subsequent enrollment are driven by results in math courses. Notably, the estimated effects do not change substantially after controlling for instructors’ demographic characteristics and degree attainment, but the size of the estimated effects is reduced by up to 40% when the analytic model accounts for course scheduling. Results of a survey on faculty professional experiences at the six colleges in the study suggest that part-time faculty had less institutional knowledge than full-time faculty did about both academic and nonacademic services. Given that part-time faculty did not have negative effects on the pass rates of students who did enroll in subsequent courses, it appears more likely that inferior working conditions for part-time faculty, rather than inferior instructional practices, are driving the negative effects on students’ subsequent course enrollment

The Effects of Corequisite Remediation: Evidence From a Statewide Reform in Tennessee

Corequisite remediation, which mainstreams students deemed academically underprepared into college-level courses with additional learning support, is rapidly being adopted by colleges across the nation. This paper provides the first causal evidence on a system-wide corequisite reform, using data from all 13 community colleges affiliated with the Tennessee Board of Regents. Using regression discontinuity and difference-in-regression-discontinuity designs, the authors estimated the causal effects of placement into corequisite remediation compared with placement into traditional prerequisite remediation and direct placement into college-level courses. For students on the margin of the college readiness threshold, those placed into corequisite remediation were 15 percentage points more likely to pass gateway math and 13 percentage points more likely to pass gateway English within one year of enrollment than similar students placed into prerequisite remediation. Compared with their counterparts placed directly into college-level courses, students placed into corequisite remediation had similar gateway course completion rates and were about 8 percentage points more likely to enroll in and pass a subsequent college-level math course after completing gateway math. The positive effects of corequisite remediation compared with prerequisite remediation in math were largely driven by efforts to guide students to take math courses aligned with the requirements for their program rather than placing most students into the algebra–calculus track by default, as has been the standard practice. The authors found no significant impacts of placement into corequisite remediation on enrollment persistence, transfer to a four-year college, or degree completion. This suggests that corequisite reforms, though effective in helping students pass college-level math and English, are not sufficient to improve college completion rates overall

How Did Six Community Colleges Design Supports for Part-Time Faculty? A Report on Achieving the Dream's Engaging Adjuncts Project

This report describes findings from a study of the Engaging Adjunct Faculty in the Student Success Movement project, a two-year initiative led by Achieving the Dream to develop and implement strategies to support adjunct faculty in improving student outcomes. Work in the project—guided by design principles related to classroom activities, professional development, employment policies, and the use of data—was led by teams of full- and part-time faculty and administrators at six participating community colleges. A key objective of the project was to generate information about promising, scalable, and sustainable engagement strategies that could be shared across the national network of Achieving the Dream colleges. Using survey, interview, and student transcript data, CCRC documented a range of strategies that colleges designed to support and engage their adjunct faculty, examined how the strategies were implemented, and measured the effects of a set of selected activities on faculty and students. Drawing on implementation findings presented in this report, the authors offer four recommendations for colleges seeking to provide supports for part-time faculty: Ground decisions on adjunct faculty supports in local data on adjunct faculty needs. Embed adjunct faculty supports into existing institutional infrastructure and initiatives. Examine college policies and practices that impact the working lives of adjunct faculty. Consider intended outcomes for faculty engagement strategies and create a plan for measurement

Lingerers in the Community College

Many community college students fail to graduate. Even among those students who enroll for a substantial period of time and who earn a significant number of college credits, many fail to complete an award. To improve completion rates in community colleges, administrators may want to focus attention on this group of students we call “lingerers.” Compared with other students, such as those who drop out early in their college careers, lingerers demonstrate persistence and a strong intention to complete a college program, yet they do not earn an award. This result is costly both for the students and the colleges they attend. In this analysis, we examine the following questions: What are the characteristics of lingerers in community college? How do their course-taking behaviors differ from those of students who complete an award? What prevents them from completing? Our analysis is based on extensive unit record data on cohorts of students at nine community colleges in three states. The data include information on student demographics, course enrollment and performance, credential completion, and transfer. We track students for up to five academic years. The data used in this analysis are from the 2005–06 first-time-in-college (FTIC) student cohort at these nine colleges. Credit students (i.e., those students who either placed into or enrolled in developmental education or those who either placed into or enrolled in college-level coursework) constituted 36 percent of the full FTIC sample. We limit our study to this subset of credit students in order to restrict our analysis to students who were mostly likely to earn an award or transfer to a four-year college. As a result, the full sample used in our analysis is 27,713 students. We define lingerers as students in the sample who completed 30 or more college-level semester credits and were still enrolled in the same community college in their fifth year but who had not yet earned a credential. About 9 percent of students in our sample were lingerers. We also make comparisons with “completers,” students who earned an associate degree at the community college within five years. About 6 percent of students in our sample were completers

KCTCS Enhancing Programs for IT Certification (EPIC)

As technology and the labor market continue to evolve, community colleges face the crucial challenge of preparing students for contemporary high-skill, high-wage jobs. In an effort to spur the development of new programs that effectively train students for today’s dynamic workforce, the U.S. Department of Labor gave a consortium of six Kentucky community colleges a four-year, $10 million grant in October 2014. The grant money supported Enhancing Programs for IT Certification (EPIC), an online, competency-based curriculum that expands access to computer and medical information technology credentialing programs. This report describes researchers’ qualitative analysis of EPIC and evaluates the program’s implementation and outcomes. The authors found that the program was implemented mostly as planned; by the end of the grant period, it had produced more courses and credentials than initially proposed. The report also recounts challenges researchers faced in evaluating the impact of EPIC on students, due in part to the small sample of students who took at least two program courses and the short time span of this work. Regarding course grades, the authors found that while EPIC students did not underperform in comparison to their peers, they were unable to draw any strong conclusions from their analyses. The report concludes with suggestions for the field of online competency-based education and posits questions for future research

Using Data Mining to Explore Why Community College Transfer Students Earn Bachelor’s Degrees With Excess Credits

Community college transfer students encounter challenges progressing toward a bachelor’s degree, leading to widespread transfer credit loss. This in turn may lower students’ chances of credential completion and increase the time and costs for students, their families, and taxpayers. This study reviews review three definitions of credit transfer inefficiency—credit transferability, credit applicability, and excess credits among completers—focusing on the last to examine why community college transfer students often end up with excess credits that do not count toward a bachelor’s degree. The authors use student transcript data from two state systems to examine the course-taking behaviors of community college transfer students who earn bachelor’s degrees with numerous excess credits and with few excess credits. Data-mining techniques enable them to examine a large number of variables that could explain the variation in students’ excess credits at graduation, including not only student demographics but also the types and timing of courses taken. Overall, more excess credits are associated with several factors, including taking larger proportions of 100- and 200-level courses and smaller proportions of 300-level courses throughout students’ progression toward completion, and taking 100-level courses in any subject—and specifically in math—immediately after transferring to a four-year institution. Findings suggest that institutions could help reduce credit transfer inefficiency by encouraging students to explore and choose a bachelor’s degree major early on so they can take the required lower division (100- and 200-level) courses at the community college and take mostly upper division 300- and 400-level courses in their desired major field once they transfer to a four-year institution

Strengthening Transfer Paths to a Bachelor’s Degree: Identifying Effective Two-Year to Four-Year College Partnerships

While the academic preparation of students for vertical transfer from two- to four-year colleges has traditionally been viewed as the major responsibility of the home institutions, there is a growing consensus that the receiving institutions play a critical role in facilitating the transfer process and in supporting students’ academic success after transfer. The goal of improving transfer outcomes cannot be fully achieved until colleges nationwide are provided with commonly accepted metrics and methods for measuring the effectiveness of transfer partnerships. Using the individual term-by-term college enrollment records from the National Student Clearinghouse for the entire 2007 fall cohort of first-time-in-college community college students nationwide, this paper introduces a two-stage, input-adjusted, value-added analytic framework for identifying partnerships of two- and four-year institutions that are more effective than expected in enabling community college students to transfer to a four-year institution and earn a bachelor’s degree in a timely fashion. In doing so, the authors provide a description of transfer patterns nationwide, broken out by key institutional characteristics. Recommendations and cautions for using this framework to evaluate and benchmark institutional performance in terms of supporting the academic success of vertical transfer students for baccalaureate attainment are also discussed

Exploring the State of the Humanities in Community Colleges

Drawing on research literature and a set of informal interviews with humanities faculty and leaders of relevant initiatives, this paper first discusses what is known about humanities coursework in community colleges. It then outlines three key challenges facing humanities education in this higher education sector: 1. an oversimplified identification of community colleges as providers primarily of vocational education, 2. limited professional supports for community college humanities faculty, and 3. weak humanities transfer pathways between community colleges and destination four-year colleges. The paper goes on to describe current efforts that attempt to address these challenges and concludes with a call for future research intended to enhance our understanding of the humanities in community colleges and the ways humanities education in community colleges might be strengthened and improved

Learned Smartphone ISP on Mobile GPUs with Deep Learning, Mobile AI & AIM 2022 Challenge: Report

The role of mobile cameras increased dramatically over the past few years, leading to more and more research in automatic image quality enhancement and RAW photo processing. In this Mobile AI challenge, the target was to develop an efficient end-to-end AI-based image signal processing (ISP) pipeline replacing the standard mobile ISPs that can run on modern smartphone GPUs using TensorFlow Lite. The participants were provided with a large-scale Fujifilm UltraISP dataset consisting of thousands of paired photos captured with a normal mobile camera sensor and a professional 102MP medium-format FujiFilm GFX100 camera. The runtime of the resulting models was evaluated on the Snapdragon's 8 Gen 1 GPU that provides excellent acceleration results for the majority of common deep learning ops. The proposed solutions are compatible with all recent mobile GPUs, being able to process Full HD photos in less than 20-50 milliseconds while achieving high fidelity results. A detailed description of all models developed in this challenge is provided in this paper