| | | Recent Publications | | Accounting for Higher Education Accountability: Political Origins of Performance Funding for Higher EducationPerformance funding finances public higher education institutions based on outcomes such as retention, course and degree completion, and job placement rather than inputs such as enrollments. This study examines the political forces that have driven the development of performance funding in some states but not others.View AbstractWashington State Student Achievement Initiative: Achievement Points Analysis for Academic Years 2007–2011In 2007, the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges launched the Student Achievement Initiative (SAI), a system-wide policy to reward colleges for improvements in student achievement. This paper uses data from 2007 to 2011 to examine the performance of Washington State’s two-year colleges under this policy.View AbstractValuable Learning or "Spinning Their Wheels"? Understanding Excess Credits Earned by Community College Associate Degree Completers (CCRC Working Paper No. 44)This paper documents the phenomenon of excess credits by examining the credit distributions of six cohorts of students in one state’s community college system. Excess credits accounted for about 12 percent of all college-level credits earned by students who completed a degree. Among the excess credits of students enrolled in particular programs, most were spread out over a wide variety of subject-specific and general courses. The paper discusses possible reasons why students earn excess credits, and it describes techniques colleges can use to determine the extent and distribution of excess credits among their students, with an eye to creating more efficient pathways to a degree.View AbstractMeasuring Efficiency in the Community College Sector (CCRC Working Paper No. 43)Community colleges are increasingly asked to demonstrate efficiency and improve productivity, even as these concepts are not clearly defined and require a significant set of assumptions to determine. This paper describes a preferred economic definition of efficiency: fiscal and social cost per degree. It then assesses the validity of using IPEDS data to calculate efficiency for a community college system.View Abstract | | View all publications > |
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| Did You Know | Research on effective postsecondary schools, K-12 schools, and private sector firms tends to converge on a specific set of organizational practices that lead to superior outcomes.
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