Publications

This NBER working paper uses state administrative data and unemployment records to construct a variety of possible institution-level labor market outcome metrics to explore how sensitive institutional ratings are to the choice of labor market metric, length of follow-up, and inclusion of adjustments for student characteristics.

Using proximity to the closest four-year college as an instrumental variable, this CAPSEE working paper analyzes public higher education data from an anonymous state to examine how enrolling in summer credits can impact college and labor market outcomes.

This report investigates the national landscape of computer science students at community colleges in order to better understand student behaviors and institutional characteristics that support or hinder community college students’ efforts to attain a computer science bachelor’s degree.

This review describes the early experiences of five colleges that received the Kisco Foundation’s Kohlberg Prize, a grant aimed at making community colleges more welcoming and better able to meet the needs of veteran students.

This practice guide presents six evidence-based recommendations for college and university faculty, administrators, and advisors working to improve the success of students academically underprepared for college.

This book chapter replicates and extends analyses completed in other statewide studies and estimates returns to credentials and credit accumulation for first-time college students who enrolled in the Virginia Community College System (VCCS) in 2004–2005 using a classic Mincerian approach.

This brief discusses four colleges’ STEM-focused iPASS implementation, including their reasons for undertaking reform, their plans for piloting and scaling up iPASS, and early evidence of change.

In this report for Brookings, Judith Scott-Clayton lays out a new analysis that shows that the gap in student debt between Black and White bachelor's degree earners triples in the four years after graduation.

This paper examines the current state of the literature on Integrated Planning and Advising for Student Success (iPASS), an increasingly popular approach to technology-mediated advising reform.

This book is the culmination of a three-year study of performance funding in Indiana, Ohio, and Tennessee. Based on interviews with state officials and staff at 18 public institutions, the book delves into the policy implications of performance funding, which ties state financial support of colleges and universities to institutional performance.

Building on Karp's 2011 framework of nonacademic support, this article explores the evidence that holistic support can encourage community college students’ success.

This paper utilizes two complementary quasi-experimental strategies to identify causal effects of the WV PROMISE scholarship, a broad-based state merit aid program, up to 10 years post–college entry and examine important outcomes that have not previously been examined, including homeownership, neighborhood characteristics, and financial management.

This chapter in the book Matching Students to Opportunity examines the matching process between students and college programs or majors, primarily in community colleges.

This paper examines technology-mediated advising reform in order to contribute to the understanding of how colleges engage in transformative change to improve student outcomes.

Using national data on baccalaureate recipients in 1993 and 2008, this CAPSEE working paper examines labor market and debt outcomes four years after students graduate, with a focus on exploring heterogeneity by institution type and major, as well as trends over time.

Using student-level data from the Tennessee Board of Regents, this paper explores the academic and economic consequences of taking higher or lower credit loads in the first semester and first year of college.

This CAPSEE working paper provides a classification scheme for sub-baccalaureate STEM programs and, using data from Virginia, analyzes short-term earnings returns to community college STEM credentials.

Using data from a study of the Ford Corridors of College Success initiative, this brief examines how postsecondary institutions have attempted to develop multi-sector partnerships within a collective impact context.

This study documents the specific ways that community college career-technical programs are structured to support student success, and it provides a framework for examining structure to inform practice and guide future research efforts.

Using longitudinal student-unit record data linked to wage record data, this paper estimates the labor market returns to developmental credits versus college-level credits in two states.