Most community colleges and many state community college systems collect extensive data on individual students. Unfortunately, these data are often underutilized in efforts to improve outcomes for individual students and colleges. Community college systems and their constituent colleges have only recently come to realize the potential for using student unit record (SUR) data for more than reporting student enrollments and program graduates. By organizing these data into termby-term student transcript records over several years and incorporating individual student demographic data, colleges and states can create a powerful resource for understanding patterns of student progression and achievement over time. Understanding how students actually progress through their college programs is essential in developing strategies and choosing appropriate interventions to improve student outcomes. The challenge is to build expertise and capacity in college and state agency research departments to transform raw SUR data into meaningful information of practical use for policymakers and practitioners.

Most of the models developed to examine student persistence and attainment in postsecondary education largely fail to account for the influence of institutional factors, particularly when attendance is observed at multiple institutions. Multi-institutional attendance is common for students who begin at a community college, but until now an empirical framework to estimate the contribution of more than one institution's characteristics on students’ educational outcomes has been largely absent in the literature. One of the goals of this study is to determine which institutional characteristics are correlated with positive community college outcomes for students who attend one or more colleges as measured by individual student probability of completing a certificate or degree or transferring to a baccalaureate institution. Using individual-level data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88) and institutional-level data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), we find consistent results across different specifications; namely, a negative relationship between relatively large institutional size, proportion of part-time faculty and minority students on the attainment of community college students.

This chapter analyzes whether Hispanics and Hispanic immigrants in the City University of New York system have the same levels of access and achievement as other racial and ethnic populations.

Policymakers, educators, and researchers recognize the importance of community colleges as open door institutions that provide a wide range of students with access to college. At the same time, competing demands for the state funds that would support community colleges have resulted in reduced public allocations and higher student tuition fees. Understandably, therefore, both state policymakers and parents are increasingly focused on the returns to their public or private investments in education, and the outcomes of community college attendance are now under greater scrutiny. To facilitate the evaluation of the colleges, there are now available data, through the Student Right-to-Know and Campus Security Act (1990), which amended the Higher Education Act, on every college’s graduation rate for fall semester cohorts of first-time, fulltime (FTFT) students in degree programs. This information is known as the Student Right-to-Know (SRK) data. A related public concern is how the outcomes of community college students can be improved. Therefore, attempts are now being made to clarify the way that specific students define success and to identify the college policies and practices that can promote success for all students. For some community college students, college completion, defined as earning a degree or certificate, is the appropriate measure of success. For other students, success is demonstrated by transferring to a baccalaureate institution. Still others are satisfied with completing courses that increase their knowledge or skill level in a particular area even though their educational experience is not considered successful as defined by traditional educational outcomes. Because of this range of outcomes for their students, some community colleges argue that focusing on the completion rate of a college is misleading, because many students do not have graduation as an objective. Further, many students face insurmountable barriers to success in college, such as family and work responsibilities and deficient academic preparation, which are beyond the control of the college. Nevertheless, data on goals and expectations do indicate that community college students are ambitious and that a majority of students who state that they want to complete a degree fail to do so (Bailey, Jenkins, & Leinbach, 2005). Moreover, high aspirations make economic sense since earning only a few credits without completing a certificate or degree has few income returns (Bailey, Kienzl, & Marcotte, 2004). Given the importance of completions, this Brief reports on research conducted by the Community College Research Center designed to strengthen the public’s ability to assess and compare community college performance by measuring the effect of certain institutional characteristics on graduation rates. The research consisted of the development of models, based on SRK graduation rate data, which can identify the institutional characteristics that might influence those rates and then measure the effect of those characteristics on the rates. The ultimate goal of the research is to help community college’s improve the educational outcomes of their students.

Over the last decade, policymakers, educators, and researchers have increasingly sought to understand community college policies and practices that promote students' success. This effort has been partly driven by an increased emphasis on outcome accountability, but it has also promoted a productive discussion about improving institutional performance. The research reported here has two related goals. One goal is to work towards strengthening the ability to assess and compare institutional performance. We thus have developed a model that can be used to adjust simple graduation rates for institutional characteristics, such as student composition, college resources, size, and location, all of which might influence those rates. Our long-term goal is to understand how to improve student outcomes, so the paper also uses the model to measure the effect of those institutional characteristics on graduation rates. We use data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) surveys, applying a weighted least-squares procedure for grouped data to estimate an institutional-completion rates model. This analysis confirms several hypotheses about institutional determinants of graduation rates at community colleges. Our results indicate a consistent negative relationship between enrollment size and completion. Additionally, colleges with high shares of minority students, part-time students, and women have lower graduation rates. A final significant finding among institutional characteristics is that greater instructional expenditures are related to a greater likelihood of graduation. The method developed here can be used to better assess the performance of community colleges.

The educational effectiveness of community colleges is under new scrutiny as a result of both a federal government focus on accountability of higher education institutions and greater competition for the state funds traditionally directed to the colleges. Policymakers, who want to tie public college allocations to their outcomes, and families, who are investing sizeable amounts in increased community college tuition, want assurances that the colleges will provide educational returns that justify their cost. Community colleges must collect and report graduation and transfer rates, based on the outcomes of fall semester cohorts of first-time, full-time students in degree programs, to meet the requirements of the Student Right-to-Know and Campus Security Act (1990). Current convention is to use these Student Right-to-Know (SRK) data as the measure of a college’s effectiveness, and they indicate that completion rates are very low for community colleges overall. Indeed, more than half the students who enroll eventually leave without a credential. But the value of SRK data as appropriate measures for outcome-based accountability is disputed by college advocates, who assert that they are not accurate reflections of student success for a variety of reasons. This Brief summarizes research conducted by the Community College Research Center that used data on student characteristics and educational outcomes from several federal government sources to explore the legitimacy of the various ways that college effectiveness can be assessed by using measures of student success. It takes account of the sometimes competing measurement preferences of the interested parties and identifies the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Community colleges are open-door institutions serving many students with characteristics that can make college completion a challenge. Their graduation rates are often considered low, but their students do not always have earning a degree as a goal. While individuals may feel that their college experience was a success, standard graduation rate measures of performance count a student’s enrollment as a failure unless it culminates in a credential or transfer to a four-year institution. This paper explores the impact of students’ reasons for enrollment and educational expectations on their outcomes and, thus, on the performance of their college, showing that community college students with degree and transfer goals are more likely to graduate or transfer. Still, an analysis suggests that even among only students who state that their goal is a degree, certificate, or transfer, fewer than 50 percent achieve that goal within six years. Moreover, large gaps in success rates for Black and Hispanic students cannot be explained by differences in either their reason for enrolling or their educational expectations. We also show that students’ educational expectations should not be treated as fixed, and that, not surprisingly, the experience of college has a role in shaping their expectations. We conclude that educators and policy makers should be cautious in using student goals as benchmarks for success, and that assumptions about student goals should not be used to discourage efforts to improve overall performance and reduce disparities between groups. Colleges need to recognize the dynamic nature of student intentions and expectations, the factors that shape these goals before entering college, and the institutional role in shaping them while at college.