Publications
When College Students Start Behind
This report for The Century Foundation's College Completion Series lays out the open questions on how to reform developmental education.
Do Students Benefit From Going Backward? The Academic and Labor Market Consequences of Four- to Two-Year College Transfer
This CAPSEE working paper examines the effects of four-year to two-year college transfer on “struggling” students, or those who earned less than a 3.0 grade point average in the first term.
Improving Student Services for Military Veterans
Based largely on an examination of college proposals for the Kisco Foundation’s Kohlberg Prize, this review (summary available) presents key insights and policy recommendations about services for military veterans attending community colleges.
The Transfer Playbook: Essential Practices for Two- and Four-Year Colleges
This playbook is a practical guide to designing and implementing a key set of practices that will help community colleges and their four-year college partners improve bachelor’s completion rates for students who start at community colleges.
Tax Benefits for College Attendance
This NBER working paper outlines tax-based student aid programs and assesses their impact on student behavior.
Modularization in Developmental Mathematics in Two States: Implementation and Early Outcomes
This paper discusses the implementation of modularized developmental mathematics reforms in North Carolina and Virginia, presents student outcomes for two distinct course structures, and considers the opportunities and challenges they present.
How and Why Does Two-Year College Entry Influence Baccalaureate Aspirants’ Academic and Labor Market Outcomes?
Using detailed administrative data from Virginia, this CAPSEE working paper examines how and why the community college pathway to a baccalaureate influences students’ degree attainment and short-term labor market performance.
CCRC Currents 2016
In CCRC's 2016 newsletter, CCRC Director Thomas Bailey writes about the growth and influence of the guided pathways model.
Looking Inside the Black Box of Performance Funding for Higher Education: Policy Instruments, Organizational Obstacles, and Intended and Unintended Impacts
In addition to drawing on the existing body of research on performance funding, this journal article reports data from a study of the implementation of performance funding in three leading states (Indiana, Ohio, and Tennessee) and its impacts on three universities and three community colleges in each state.
Is Corequisite Remediation Cost-Effective? Early Findings From Tennessee
This brief examines the corequisite remediation model as it was implemented in Tennessee community colleges in fall 2015 and finds that it is more cost-effective than the prerequisite remediation model the colleges formerly used.
Redesigning a Student Success Course for Sustained Impact: Early Outcomes Findings
Based on a qualitative and quantitative study at Bronx Community College, this paper provides findings on students who take First Year Seminar, a recently redesigned student success course.
Improving the Transition to College: Estimating the Impact of High School Transition Courses on Short-Term College Outcomes
This study uses a regression discontinuity design to estimate the effect of participation in a mathematics transition course on college-level math outcomes in West Virginia for the 2011–12 and 2012–13 high school senior cohorts.
Building Student Momentum From High School Into College
This Jobs for the Future publication proposes research-based milestones of student momentum from twelfth grade through the first year of college, and suggests ways that local high school and college partners can collaborate to support student success.
Collective Impact: Theory Versus Reality
This Corridors of College Success brief highlights challenges involved in collective impact work and provides a lens for understanding why well-intentioned collective impact efforts may not take root.
Predicting Online Student Outcomes From a Measure of Course Quality
This paper introduces an online course quality rubric addressing four quality areas, and it examines the relationship between each quality area and student end-of-semester performance.
Establishing the Backbone: An Underexplored Facet of Collective Impact Efforts
This brief, the second in CCRC’s Corridors of College Success series, describes the challenges that early-stage collective impact communities face as they work to identify potential backbone organizations and establish a backbone structure.
What We Know About Transition Courses
Based on research as well as discussion among researchers, practitioners, and policymakers from seven states, this overview summarizes the state of knowledge on transition courses.
Implementation of High School-to-College Transition Courses in Four States
Based on a qualitative study, this report describes the implementation of transition courses in English and math in California, New York City, Tennessee, and West Virginia.
Tracking Transfer: New Measures of Institutional and State Effectiveness in Helping Community College Students Attain Bachelor’s Degrees
This report uses five metrics to measure the effectiveness of two- and four-year institutions in enabling community college students to transfer to four-year institutions and earn bachelor’s degrees.
Examining the Earnings Trajectories of Community College Students Using a Piecewise Growth Curve Modeling Approach
This paper introduces a piecewise growth approach to analyzing labor market outcomes of students, and it discusses how insights gained from the approach can be used to strengthen econometric analyses of labor market returns.