Publications

This practitioner packet summarizes evidence supporting the guided pathways reform model, describes how one college implemented guided pathways, and offers tips for getting started on guided pathways reforms.

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.

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.

This paper employs a novel graphical technique to illustrate the diverse enrollment patterns of community college students and examines the relationship between these patterns and successful student outcomes.

This publication describes efforts by a growing number of colleges and universities to create “guided pathways” designed to increase the rate at which students enter and complete a program of study.

This brief examines characteristics and course-taking patterns of students who accumulate a substantial number of college credits but do not earn an award by their fifth year of enrollment.

This publication examines the diversity of enrollment patterns among community college students and demonstrates a novel graphical technique for displaying large numbers of enrollment patterns.

This publication compares how long it takes students to reach important progression milestones based on their level of academic readiness upon entry.

This article reviews research on what community colleges and less selective public universities can do to graduate more students at a lower cost without sacrificing access or quality.

This publication, the second in CCRC’s Analytics series, examines the progression of community college students in transfer-oriented programs through the general education core curriculum.

This report examines the use of data on students by faculty, administrators, and student services staff at six Washington State colleges that joined Achieving the Dream in 2006–2007.

This report introduces an approach to examining students’ college experiences, identifying factors that catalyze or impede their progress, and using these insights to improve student outcomes.

This publication examines the hidden complexity of completion outcome data and offers an approach to teasing out the complex factors that affect student completion in order to boost student success.

This publication presents eight core ideas to help community college leaders and practitioners address the fundamental challenges to student success.

The first in CCRC's analytics series, this publication examines characteristics of students who drop out of college after only one semester.

This study examines the structure of community college career-technical programs and its association with program completion.

This paper argues that to improve completion rates, colleges must help students enter programs as soon as possible; it presents a method for measuring program entry and completion rates using transcript data.

A clustering algorithm is applied to the transcripts of a cohort of first-time students in the Washington State system in order to determine what programs of study they appear to be pursuing.

Administrative data from Washington State is used to chart the educational pathways of first-time community college students, with a focus on young, socioeconomically disadvantaged students.

Evidence from behavioral economics and psychology lends support for the idea that students are more likely to persist and succeed in programs with highly structured paths to completion.