Using a dataset containing nearly 500,000 courses taken by over 40,000 community and technical college students in Washington State, this study examines how well students adapt to the online environment in terms of their ability to persist and earn strong grades in online courses relative to their ability to do so in face-to-face courses. While all types of students in the study suffered decrements in performance in online courses, some struggled more than others to adapt: males, younger students, Black students, and students with lower grade point averages. In particular, students struggled in subject areas such as English and social science, which was due in part to negative peer effects in these online courses.
Community colleges are under pressure to improve completion rates and efficiency despite limited economic evidence on how to do so and the consequences of different reform strategies. Here, we set out an economic model of student course pathways linked to college expenditures and revenues. Using detailed data from a single college, we calculate baseline efficiency and differences in efficiency for students who follow different pathways. We simulate changes in output, expenditures, revenues, net revenues, and efficiency assuming that the college meets performance targets. We find substantial differences in efficiency across pathways and significant differences in efficiency across strategies to help students complete college. The model has wide practical application for community colleges.
Using data from the Virginia Community College System and building upon prior Florida-based research, this study examines whether student success course enrollment, as well as student and institutional characteristics, has positive associations with shorter term student outcomes, including earning any college credits within the first year and persistence into the second year. The present study finds that students who enrolled in a student success course in the first semester were more likely to earn any college-level credits within the first year and were more likely to persist to the second year. The study also finds that students who were referred to developmental education were more likely to earn any college-level credits within the first year if they enrolled in a student success course in their first term.
iii Overview In 2004, Lumina Foundation for Education launched an innovative national reform initiative, Achieving the Dream (ATD), with the purpose of increasing the persistence and completion rates of community college students, especially low-income students and students of color, through evidence-based institutional change. Originally consisting of 26 partner colleges in five states, today more than 150 colleges in 30 states and the District of Columbia participate in ATD, which in 2010 became a national nonprofit organization. This report examines six community and technical colleges in Washington State that joined the initiative in 2006 (" Round 3 ") and were provided with grant funding from College Spark Washington and the services of a leadership coach and data coach to facilitate their ATD efforts. The report (1) describes the progress each college made in implementing ATD's " culture of evidence " principles for institutional improvement; (2) examines strategies implemented by the colleges to improve student outcomes, comparing them to interventions developed by the 26 " Round 1 " colleges that joined ATD in 2004; and (3) charts trends in student outcomes in the period before and after the Washington colleges joined the initiative. Key findings for the six Washington ATD colleges are: • Progress toward building a culture of evidence. All but one of the colleges made at least some progress. Two colleges made substantial progress, moving from a low level of implementation to a high level over the five years of their ATD involvement. Specifically, they strengthened student success goals and strategies, increased their institutional research capacities, created institutional effectiveness committees, and strengthened their program review processes. • Development of student success strategies. Several of the colleges — those further along in implementing the ATD culture of evidence principles — made significant systemic changes to programs and services. Compared with the Round 1 ATD colleges, the Washington colleges were more likely to have implemented changes in instruction as opposed to student support services and were more successful in operating improvement strategies at scale. • Student outcome trends after ATD implementation. The average student outcomes across the six colleges appear largely unchanged, as do the racial and economic achievement gaps. The colleges that succeeded in implementing improvement strategies at scale did so only later in the iv period under study. It may be too early to see their impact. On the other hand, most of the reforms implemented by the Washington colleges …
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.
To improve low rates of credential attainment in community colleges, individual schools as well as a number of national organizations have developed a range of initiatives focused on increasing rates of college completion and student success. Although the importance of non-academic factors in college completion and student success has been well established, questions remain about the best ways to structure the community college environment to foster students’ sense of belonging and promote behaviors that are associated with success. This paper addresses this gap in the literature by focusing on the academic confidence of students at the outset of their community college careers, the ways in which their confidence may impact student behaviors and persistence, and how student confidence is affected by students’ experiences in college. Using data from nearly 100 community college student interviews, this paper examines students’ descriptions of their confidence upon entering college and of the shifts in confidence they experienced early in their college careers. Our findings suggest that student confidence is shaped in part by past academic experiences and expectations of college upon entry. Using student descriptions of their perceptions of college and of themselves, we describe the characteristics of students who describe themselves as self-assured and those who identify as apprehensive. The interview data reveal that student confidence is continually shifting as a result of interactions with peers, faculty, and others. Our analysis also indicates that academic confidence can impact student motivation and academic behaviors that are associated with success. Importantly, this paper identifies the nature of those experiences that positively reinforce student confidence, events that we term experiences of earned success. Finally, we describe ways to structure classroom and other on-campus environments to create opportunities for students to experience earned success and ultimately enhance their commitment to academic pursuits.
Using data obtained from interviews and program websites at Washington community and technical colleges, the authors of this study examine the structure of community college career-technical programs in allied health, business and marketing, computer and information studies, and mechanics and repair. A framework for structure with four dimensions—program alignment, program prescription, information quality, and active program advising and support—is used to evaluate the practices of relatively highand low-performing colleges within each field of study. The authors reviewed the websites of all programs at highand low-performing colleges in each of these fields of study and conducted case studies on individual programs from these fields, interviewing faculty, administrators, and counselors to learn more about the dimensions of structure in the programs. The allied health, computer and information science, and mechanics and repair programs were all found to be highly structured; the business and marketing programs were found to have a moderate level of structure. Overall, given that all of the programs were at least moderately structured, there was limited evidence of a connection between program structure and program performance. Table of
At open-access two-year public colleges, the goal of the traditional assessment and placement process is to match incoming students to the developmental or collegelevel courses for which they have adequate preparation; the process presumably increases underprepared students’ chances of shortand long-term success in college while maintaining the academic quality and rigor of college-level courses. However, the traditional process may be limited in its ability to achieve these aims due to poor course placement accuracy and inconsistent standards of college readiness. To understand current approaches that seek to improve the process, we conducted a scan of assessment and placement policies and practices at open-access two-year colleges in Georgia, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin. We describe the variety of approaches that systems and colleges employed to ameliorate poor course placement accuracy and inconsistent standards associated with the traditional process. Taking a broad view of the extent of these approaches, we find that most colleges we studied adopted a measured approach that addressed a single limitation without attending to other limitations that contribute to the same overall problem of poor course placement accuracy or inconsistent standards. Much less common were comprehensive approaches that attended to multiple limitations of the process; these approaches were likely to result from changes to developmental education as a whole. Drawing from the study’s findings, we also discuss how colleges can overcome barriers to reform in order to implement approaches that hold promise for improved course placement accuracy, more consistent standards of college readiness, and, potentially, greater long-term academic success of community college students.
While promoting postsecondary credential completion is a national priority intended to help graduates secure good jobs, the value of credentials in the labor market from the perspective of employers is not well understood. Specifically, more attention is needed to understand how credentials align with employer needs. Through in-depth interviews with managers responsible for hiring information technology technicians, we examined their perceptions of associate and bachelor’s degree holders in two contrasting labor markets: Detroit and Seattle. The study led to several key findings. First, across the two labor markets, employers expected some common qualities in both associate and bachelor’s degree holders, including technical skills and knowledge, thinking skills, communication skills, and discipline. Second, while they expected some positive qualities in associate degree holders that were distinctive to this credential, many hiring managers also expected negative characteristics, such as a lack of academic ability, initiative, or skill. However, while both associate and bachelor’s degrees provided relevant information about potential workers, employers did not expect the credentials to provide information about certain key qualities they sought in workers, including competency in customer service and teamwork, and personal interest in technology. Some of the qualities that employers expected in associate degree holders were linked to their local labor markets and their perceptions of the local community colleges. This study provides suggestions on how an understanding of the specific qualities employers expect in credential holders and of the role of the local labor market can help colleges better engage with employers and fine-tune their programs to more effectively meet students’ and employer’s needs.
Community colleges are typically assumed to be nonselective, open-access institutions. Yet access to college-level courses at such institutions is far from guaranteed: the vast majority of two-year institutions administer high-stakes exams to entering students that determine their placement into either college-level or remedial education. Despite the stakes involved, there has been relatively little research investigating whether such exams are valid for their intended purpose, or whether other measures of preparedness might be equally or even more effective. This paper contributes to the literature by analyzing the predictive validity of one of the most commonly used assessments, using data on over 42,000 first-time entrants to a large, urban community college system. Using both traditional correlation coefficients as well as more useful decision-theoretic measures of placement accuracy and error rates, I find that placement exams are more predictive of success in math than in English, and more predictive of who is likely to do well in college-level coursework than of who is likely to fail. Utilizing multiple measures to make placement decisions could reduce severe misplacements by about 15 percent without changing the remediation rate, or could reduce the remediation rate by 8 to 12 percentage points while maintaining or increasing success rates in collegelevel courses. Implications and limitations are discussed.
In 2007, the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) launched a performance reporting and funding policy called the Student Achievement Initiative (SAI) both to improve public accountability by more accurately describing what students achieve from enrolling in community colleges and to provide incentives to colleges through financial rewards for increasing student success. This report presents findings from a three-year evaluation of the initiative that was designed to assess how and to what extent the SAI model of performance funding encourages colleges to track trends in student achievement and improve student outcomes. The quantitative component of the evaluation was an analysis of “achievement point” accumulation by colleges over the period 2007 to 2011. The qualitative component was based on a synthesis of approximately 250 interviews with faculty, staff, and administrators at 20 of Washington State’s 34 community and technical colleges that took place in spring 2012. Key broad findings include: • The SAI is viewed as one force among others pushing the colleges to improve student success. The funding is not a significant factor motivating the colleges, largely because the amount (less than one percent of the system’s total operating budget) is too small to have much impact. • On average, the colleges increased their point total by 31 percent between 2007 and 2011, with the relative positions of the colleges remaining stable. Although there was evidence of some gains in momentum (i.e., forward progress) for students who were already accumulating credits and making progress, overall student momentum does not seem to have changed much during the period in which the SAI has been in effect, even as aggregate achievement points have increased. • While larger colleges earn more awards than smaller colleges, there is little evidence that colleges serving more at-risk, low-income students are penalized by the SAI awards method. Consistent with the SAI’s goals, the basic skills metric appears to have encouraged enrollment from traditionally underserved groups. • The intermediate milestone framework is viewed as a helpful way to focus collective efforts on student progression and publicly account for college performance. In order to understand the impact of strategies for improving student outcomes, however, colleges have found they need to use longitudinal cohort data in conjunction with the cross-sectional SAI metrics. The funding mechanism has proved problematic and unpopular, as SAI funding has come from reallocated base funds rather than as additional funds as originally intended.
