For many students at community colleges, finding a path to degree completion is the equivalent of navigating a shapeless river on a dark night—but very few studies have explicitly examined the role of structure in student persistence. This paper addresses the issue of student persistence by integrating previously disconnected evidence and drawing on ideas from behavioral economics and psychology.
Central to the paper is the structure hypothesis: that community college students will be more likely to persist and succeed in programs that are tightly and consciously structured, with relatively little room for individuals to unintentionally deviate from paths toward completion, and with limited bureaucratic obstacles for students to circumnavigate.
Evidence suggests that the lack of structure in many community colleges is likely to result in less-than-optimal decisions by students about whether and how to persist toward a credential. Though there is no silver-bullet intervention to address this problem, this paper highlights several promising approaches and suggests directions for future experimentation and research.
A brief of this paper, The Structure of Student Decision-Making at Community Colleges, is available for download.
