By Elizabeth Ganga and Shayleah Jenkins
Much of CCRC’s research now looks far past students’ time in community colleges to focus on where they will end up.
Colleges need to do more than just remove obstacles in the way of graduation, CCRC researchers said at last week’s Achieving the Dream Annual Convening in Philadelphia. They need to ensure that they are focused on getting students into programs that lead to a good job or to finishing a bachelor’s program. Many of CCRC’s individual areas of research—dual enrollment, transfer, program value, and more—are looking toward post-community-college success, what some at DREAM called “community college 3.0.”
“It’s building on the work of student success that most of you in this room have been working on for a long time,” said Senior Research Scholar Davis Jenkins in a session on CCRC and the Aspen College Excellence Program’s Unlocking Opportunity project. In five sessions at DREAM, CCRC researchers and partners explained how they are working with colleges, state systems, and other organizations on the next generation of student success research.
Access slides from each session on our presentations page.
Unlocking Opportunity: Strengthening the Value of Community College Credentials
A majority of associate degrees designed for transfer are in liberal or general studies, which are not well aligned to major programs at four-year colleges and often lead to lost credits, Jenkins said. Though community colleges offer a substantial number of applied associate programs, the number of awards conferred falls far short of demand, and the on-ramps into the programs don’t work well. Colleges need to ask themselves what programs their students are in and how many lead to jobs that pay a living wage or transfer to bachelor’s programs with no excess credits.
“The idea is that if we want to recruit and retain students, we have to give them reasons to want to come and stay with us and complete our programs,” Jenkins said. “And that reason has to be to prepare them to achieve their career and educational goals.”
The colleges in the Unlocking Opportunity network aim to move more students into high-value workforce and transfer programs and to have fewer students in low-value programs by expanding high-value programs such as healthcare, ensuring students seeking to transfer follow a pre-major path, and strengthening low-opportunity workforce programs. “We don’t want to graduate our students into poverty,” said Jason Wood, the president of Southwest Wisconsin Technical College in Fennimore, Wisconsin, who spoke at the session.
Since many Southwest Tech students go on to low-wage work in agriculture, the college asked local employers how they could prepare students for better paying jobs. The employers said they would pay a premium for specific skills including pesticide application, commercial driver’s licenses, and drone certifications, so the college built those skills into its programs, Wood said.
Diving DEEP: More Purposeful Dual Enrollment Pathways as a Model for Increasing College Access
Decades of research show the benefits of dual enrollment, but there’s a lot of unrealized potential because of inequitable access to dual enrollment courses, CCRC Senior Research Associate John Fink said at a session on CCRC’s Dual Enrollment Equity Pathways (DEEP) model. About 1.2 million high school graduates each year aren’t enrolling in college, and dual enrollment could help put them on a degree path, said CCRC Senior Research Assistant Aurely Garcia Tulloch.
“We really started asking the question of access by whom, but also access to what,” Garcia Tulloch said. “Are these dual enrollment programs truly accessible and intentional and serving the students that we need most?”
CCRC’s DEEP research suggests several steps colleges can take to rethink dual enrollment as the start of a purposeful pathway to high-opportunity education and training after high school. They include improving outreach to underserved schools and students; helping students develop individualized, career-focused postsecondary education plans; and creating alternative eligibility criteria.
To expand access, Miami Dade College began using alternatives to standardized tests to assess eligibility for dual enrollment, which the state of Florida authorized during the pandemic. The college also identified several high-enrollment, high-success courses to offer to students with high school GPAs just below the eligibility cutoff to build momentum for college coursework, said Phil Giarraffa, the director of articulation and academic pathways at Miami Dade. When students enroll, they align their dual enrollment courses to their chosen high school academy, which organizes programs around careers.
“I’m able to intentionally make sure that you are on a pathway to not only be successful in that track at the high school but also leverage dual enrollment,” Giarraffa said.
Building Students’ Confidence and Learning Skills in Online Classes: Lessons from the Postsecondary Collaborative
Online learning offers students more flexibility, but research suggests student outcomes are lower in online courses than in face-to-face courses. These challenges are often exacerbated in content-heavy STEM courses and can be especially salient for students from groups marginalized in higher education, CCRC Research Associate Amy E. Brown said.The Postsecondary Teaching with Technology Collaborative, a joint research project between SRI Education, CCRC, and Achieving the Dream, developed a set of strategies to support online learners by strengthening their self-directed learning skills. Through interviews with faculty, administrators, and students and a literature review, the Collaborative identified three interventions instructors can embed in their online classrooms: videos, prompts, and student–peer interaction networks. These strategies encourage students to reflect on their learning processes and allow students to take their learning into their own hands, said Brian Jones, associate vice president for institutional effectiveness at Odessa College.
Online courses often lack the structure of in-person engagement that face-to-face courses offer, making it easier for students to fall behind or disengage, Jones said. “At Odessa College, we talk about how we engage students, and our faculty are right at the center of that.”
Transforming Transfer: Findings From the New Edition of the Transfer Playbook
Despite surveys indicating that most community college students aspire to earn a bachelor’s degree, only about a third transfer to a four-year institution. Fewer than half of those who do transfer go on to earn a bachelor’s degree within six years of community college entry, CCRC Senior Research Associate Tatiana Velasco said. These completion rates are even lower for low-income, Black, and Hispanic students.
“We often hear there’s nothing we can do,” said Joshua Wyner, executive director of the College Excellence Program at the Aspen Institute, who partners with CCRC on transfer research. “But [the data] show us that there’s a lot we can do to improve transfer outcomes.”
To improve outcomes, the researchers recommend institutions prioritize transfer at an executive level, align academic pathways to timely bachelor’s attainment, and tailor nonacademic support to students’ goals.
“There’s this notion that the people who own the game are the four-year institutions,” Velasco said. “But it takes two to transfer.”
More Essential Than Ever: Community College Pathways to Educational and Career Success
CCRC’s 2015 book, Redesigning America’s Community Colleges, outlined how community colleges could improve student success by moving from discrete reforms and success programs to whole college redesign geared toward helping students enter and complete programs. CCRC is releasing a new book in August that dives into what CCRC researchers and colleges have learned about guided pathways reforms over the last 10 years from research at more than 100 colleges, as well as the next frontiers for improvements in student success.
The early work on guided pathways focused on removing barriers to graduation, such as unnecessary developmental courses, and making the path to graduation clearer for students. The new book contends that to further improve student outcomes—and to recruit and retain more students in a fiercely competitive environment—community colleges need to do more to ensure that students are prepared to succeed in the labor market and in education beyond community college.
Students need to be able to see how their coursework leads to a good job with a living wage, either through a credential that stacks to a workforce associate degree or a transfer path to a four-year college and a bachelor’s degree. If they can take courses in their field that they find interesting, talk to advisors about their goals and interests, create a full-program plan, and build a schedule that fits their life, students will be more likely to have the motivation to enroll and persist, said CCRC Assistant Director of Research Hana Lahr.
“The big idea is how can we help students explore, choose, gain momentum, and make a plan in a program of study that’s going to help them get a good job so that they can support themselves and their families and complete that program of study in a timely and affordable way.”
