Publications
Redesigning Arithmetic for Student Success: Supporting Faculty to Teach in New Ways
This chapter describes a promising approach to teaching developmental arithmetic and prealgebra and presents findings on a faculty support network that helped instructors adopt new teaching strategies.
Strengthening Program Pathways Through Transformative Change
This chapter reports on a major college-wide effort to smooth students’ paths as they enter the college, choose a program, and progress to a credential.
Adaptability to Online Learning: Differences Across Types of Students and Academic Subject Areas
This study examines how well students adapt to the online environment in terms of their ability to persist and earn strong grades in online courses relative to their ability to do so in face-to-face courses.
Performance Funding for Higher Education: Forms, Origins, Impacts, and Futures
This article reviews the forms, extent, origins, implementation, impacts (intended and unintended), and policy prospects of performance funding.
Can Community Colleges Afford to Improve Completion? Measuring the Costs and Efficiency Effects of College Reforms
This paper introduces a model that uses transcript data matched to credit-level cost data and funding formulae to calculate the implications for efficiency of reforms intended to improve completion rates.
Improving the Targeting of Treatment: Evidence From College Remediation
This paper uses administrative data and a rich predictive model to examine the accuracy of remedial screening tests, used either with or instead of high school transcript data to determine remedial assignment.
Remedial Placement Testing in Community Colleges: What Resources Are Required, and What Does It Cost?
Using detailed data from three community colleges, the authors of this study employ the ingredients method to estimate the costs to colleges and students of remedial placement systems at community college.
Evaluating For-Profit Higher Education: Evidence From the Education Longitudinal Study
Using the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002, this CAPSEE working paper evaluates the postsecondary and labor market outcomes of students who attended for-profit colleges.
Redefining Full-Time in College: Evidence on 15-Credit Strategies
This report reviews research evidence on college policies designed to facilitate on-time degree completion among students by encouraging them to enroll in at least 15 credits per semester.
Evaluating Your College's Readiness for Technology Adoption
Based on CCRC’s Readiness for Technology Adoption framework, this self-assessment tool provides rubrics to help colleges identify issues that may need to be addressed to facilitate successful reform.
The Effects of English as a Second Language Courses on Language Minority Community College Students
This study uses a difference-in-differences approach to identify the impact of ESL compared with developmental writing at an urban community college system.
Simplifying Complexity in the Student Experience
This practitioner packet aims to help colleges identify areas where students struggle due to complexity in the academic decision-making process and devise low-cost solutions.
Redesigning the Student Intake and Information Provision Processes at a Large Comprehensive Community College
This working paper presents a case study of how one large, suburban community college planned and implemented a relatively low-cost redesign of its student intake and information provision processes.
Developmental Education Aligned to the Common Core State Standards: Insights and Illustrations
Based on interview data, this discussion paper explores whether faculty and college leaders are considering or undertaking reforms of developmental education informed by the Common Core State Standards.
Gaining Access or Losing Ground? Socioeconomically Disadvantaged Students in Undergraduate Engineering, 1994–2003
This article uses economic, human, and cultural capital theories to frame and then describe access to undergraduate engineering degree programs and bachelor's degrees.
Adopting New Technologies for Student Success: A Readiness Framework
This report presents a framework that identifies characteristics associated with colleges’ readiness to adopt technology-based reforms, emphasizing the need for both technological and cultural readiness.
Can Community Colleges Continue to Do More With Less?
In light of cost-cutting practices used by community colleges today, this article argues that the emphasis of policy and practice should be on improving efficiency: the cost per completion of a high-quality credential.
Accelerating the Integrated Instruction of Developmental Reading and Writing at Chabot College
This paper compares the academic outcomes of students at Chabot College who participated in an accelerated, one-semester developmental English course and those who enrolled in a two-semester sequence.
Increasing Access to College-Level Math: Early Outcomes Using the Virginia Placement Test
This brief examines changes in entry-level college math enrollment and completion rates in Virginia's community colleges after the introduction of a new math placement test and placement policy.
CCRC Currents 2014
In CCRC's 2014 newsletter, Director Thomas Bailey argues that comprehensive reform has the potential to move the needle on college completion.