Publications

This CAPSEE working paper examines the prevalence and consequences of Pell Grant recipients’ failure to meet the standards for satisfactory academic progress required for grant renewal.

This chapter examines the use of technology and other structural changes to encourage comprehensive advising reforms.

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 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.

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

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.

This NBER working paper outlines tax-based student aid programs and assesses their impact on student behavior

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.

Using focus group data from students at six colleges, this paper examines student preferences concerning technology-based advising tools and in-person advising sessions for different kinds of advising tasks.

Using two waves of the Beginning Postsecondary Student survey, this paper provides the first national estimates of the effect of the Federal Work-Study program on students' academic and labor market outcomes.

Based on research at six colleges, this guide provides lessons for colleges that want to use increasingly common technology tools to reform advising practices.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Drawing on interviews with students, faculty, and staff at three community colleges, this paper aims to clarify the role of community college student and the behaviors that must be enacted for students to succeed.

Findings from this paper suggest that while Pell recipients at community colleges have a stronger academic focus than non-Pell recipients, they may be taking more time to complete a credential than is prudent.

In this discussion paper, the authors argue that the time has come to comprehensively redesign the Pell program, and they propose three major structural reforms to the Pell Grant program.

This practitioner packet summarizes the research on nonacademic student supports and suggests ways to implement a system of nonacademic supports that will have more sustained impacts on student success.

This article reviews the evidence on various student aid programs and their effects on college enrollment, persistence, and completion and discusses the implications of these findings for aid policy.

This literature review examines the evidence on student decision making in the community college, focusing on the activities most relevant to students’ entry into programs of study—academic and career planning.

Using administrative data from the Virginia Community College System, this paper examines the associations between student success course enrollment and short-term student outcomes.

A study of College 101 courses at three community colleges in Virginia suggests that these courses could have long-term impacts if they focused more on the application and practice of learned skills.

This study examines the effects of student employment on academic outcomes, using a dataset that combines students' transcripts with earning records from the Unemployment Insurance system.

This journal article uses administrative data from West Virginia to provide the first quasi-experimental estimates of the effect of the Federal Work Study (FWS) program.

This paper uses a quasi-experimental approach to identify causal effects of West Virginia's PROMISE scholarship program, which offers free tuition to students who maintain a minimum GPA and course load.

Effective nonacademic supports work by creating social relationships, clarifying goals and enhancing commitment, developing college know-how, and addressing conflicting demands on students.

This paper examines the influence of validation by faculty on students' sense of integration in college and intent to persist.

The eligibility of undocumented students to apply for in-state tuition varies by state. This article analyzes the political origins of divergent responses among states, drawing on the advocacy coalition framework and policy entrepreneurship theory of policymaking.

This paper examines whether Tinto's integration framework—commonly used to examine student persistence in the four-year sector—is applicable to two-year institutions.

In this journal article, the authors examine how student success courses help students develop relationships that provide support and useful information long after the class is over.

This article explores the ways that information networks are related to student persistence in the community college and how institutional structures can encourage such networks.

This paper reviews the research literature on the effectiveness of financial aid, with special attention to its implications for policy.

This study examines the ways that student support services in community colleges inadvertently perpetuate and legitimate disadvantage.

This brief reports the findings from a CCRC study on the effectiveness of student success courses at Florida community colleges.

This working paper examines how Florida community colleges responded to the introduction of a new merit-based financial aid program.

This report presents a critical analysis of the state of the research on the effectiveness of specific practices in increasing persistence and completion at community colleges.

This article analyzes the roles of counselors in the Puente program, a high school intervention designed to improve guidance and counseling for disadvantaged high school students.

This report discusses crucial issues related to counseling and guidance in community colleges and outlines an agenda for potential future research.

This article, published in Career Research and Development, the NICEC Journal, discusses the role of information in guidance and counseling and the preconditions necessary for individuals to use information well.