Graduation Rates, Student Goals, and Measuring Community College EffectivenessBy: Thomas Bailey, D. Timothy Leinbach & Davis Jenkins — September 2005.CCRC Brief No. 28. New York: Community College Research Center, Teachers College, Columbia University.To meet the requirements of the Student
Right-to-Know and Campus Security Act of 1990, 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. Current convention is to use 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. 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. View PDF version
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