The Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance hosted a community college symposium on Monday, December 10, 2007 in Washington DC. The one-day symposium focused exclusively on issues affecting community colleges, particularly topics related to enrollment, persistence, and transfer between two- and four-year institutions.

CCRC Director Thomas Bailey spoke in the "Enduring Persistence" panel, discussing strategies that promote student persistence and completion at the community college level. Reporter Doug Lederman describes the panel in his Inside Higher Ed article, "Shining a Spotlight on 2-Year Colleges" (December 11, 2007). According to Lederman:

A panel on student persistence returned to more mundane (if slightly more grounded) material, examining programs in Louisiana in which small scholarships were shown to help keep students enrolled and in Florida, where community college students who enrolled in “College 101″ were 8 percent more likely than their peers to earn a credential (the gap was slightly wider for those enrolled in remedial courses, said Thomas Bailey, director of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College. David Prince, assistant director for research and analysis at the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, described the effort there to build a student achievement goal into the state’s funding formula for two-year institutions.

--Read the full-length article on the Inside Higher Ed web site at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/11/community

--Download the PowerPoint from Dr. Bailey's presentation