The April 10, 2007 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education highlights key points of CCRC's session, "Are Institutional Graduation Rates Valid Measures of Community College Performance?" The session occurred on Monday, April 9^th at the 2007 Annual AERA Meeting in Chicago.

The article, titled "Scholars Suggest Improvements in Graduation Data That Community Colleges Are Required to Report," features remarks made by the panelists -- CCRC Director Thomas Bailey, CCRC Senior Research Associate Davis Jenkins, Clifford Adelman of the U.S. Department of Education, and Laura Horn of MPR Associates.

"Raw graduation rates are poor measures of community-college performance," said Davis Jenkins, a senior research associate at the Community College Research Center, a unit of Teachers College of Columbia University….Mr. Jenkins also cited data from a separate policy brief that draws on a longitudinal study of 1,080 students who began community college in 1996. When they entered college, only 49 percent of those students seemed fully committed to earning a degree, Mr. Jenkins said. (He and his colleagues defined a committed student as someone whose initial goal was to earn a degree or transfer to a four-year institution, and who stayed enrolled in college for at least half of the 1996-97 academic year.)…

--Subscribers of The Chronicle of Higher Education can read the article in its entirety at: http://chronicle.com/daily/2007/04/2007041002n.htm

--Learn more about the session at: http://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/Presentation.asp?uid=162