Publications

This brief discusses why whole-college, guided pathways reforms hold promise for improving student success on a large scale, what they cost, and how the federal government can support their adoption.

This brief discusses the experiences, achievements, and challenges of 26 broad-access two- and four-year colleges that, in 2015, began steps to adopt or enhance technology-mediated advising practices to improve the way they support students.

This brief describes the substantial role community colleges play in workforce education, what innovative colleges are doing to improve programming and labor market outcomes for participants, and how the federal government can support these efforts.

Using administrative data from a large state community college system, this paper examines whether being exposed to a higher percentage of dual enrollment peers influences non-dual enrollment enrollees’ performance in college courses.

This brief describes the importance of nonacademic staff to the student experience and presents initial findings related to the Caring Campus initiative’s capacity to affect college culture and ground further change efforts.

This paper estimates the patterns and sources of White–Black and White–Hispanic enrollment gaps in Advancement Placement (AP) and dual enrollment programs across several thousand school districts and metropolitan areas in the United States.

Using descriptive methods as well as a quasi-experimental approach, this report examines the early college outcomes of Florida high school students who enrolled in a dual enrollment college algebra course.

This brief discusses how community college systems in four states—Indiana, Virginia, Texas, and Washington—supported large-scale changes to student placement practices in reaction to challenges associated with the COVID pandemic.

Drawing on interview data, this report discusses strategies that three guided pathways colleges use to help adult students enter programs of study, stay on path, and enhance learning.

This report summarizes enhancements to technology-based advising at three institutions and their effects on students' academic outcomes for four semesters after study entry.

This brief examines the relationship between BCC’s ASAP expansion and institutional change to illuminate how scaling a discrete reform can impact other areas of the college and change the way an institution serves all students.

This paper examines challenges embedded within the prevailing high school mathematics course sequence, which prioritizes algebra, and explores innovations that aim to provide curricula and pedagogy more aligned with students’ academic and career goals.

This paper examines the equity implications of existing reforms to developmental math and explores the potential of more targeted reforms to address factors such as stereotype threat, math anxiety, instructor bias, and tracking.

Drawing on research at six institutions, this guide is intended to help community college leaders understand the costs involved in implementing guided pathways reforms and develop plans for funding and sustaining them.

Drawing on data from 12 community colleges, this paper analyzes the resources required to implement guided pathways reforms and examines their feasibility and affordability, as well as their value for students.

This report describes impact findings from an evaluation of multiple measures assessment and placement at seven State University of New York (SUNY) community colleges.

This report presents findings on the implementation of technology-mediated advising reforms at California State University at Fresno, Montgomery County Community College, and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Using data on two cohorts of Florida students who started public high school in 2007 and 2012, this report analyzes dual enrollment course-taking and outcomes by racial/ethnic group (Black, Hispanic, White) and course modality (face-to-face on-college-campus, face-to-face off-campus, and online).

Based on research conducted in three states, this report identifies five principles that undergird the strategies and practices of equitable dual enrollment partnerships between high schools and colleges.

Using state administrative data and propensity score matching, this study examines the characteristics and academic outcomes of community college students who switch majors.

Using administrative data from Florida, this article examines the effect of changing the grading scale from whole-letter grades to plus/minus grades on STEM major choice.

This paper examines returns to terminal associate degrees and certificates up to 11 years after students initially entered a community college in Ohio. The authors use an individual fixed-effects approach that controls for students’ pre-enrollment earnings and allows the returns to credential completion to vary over time.

This report describes findings from a study of a two-year initiative led by Achieving the Dream to develop and implement strategies to support adjunct faculty in improving student outcomes.

This guide presents a set of example data analyses colleges can replicate to examine whether underserved groups of students are equitably represented in programs that lead to higher opportunity outcomes for employment and/or baccalaureate transfer.

Based on a forthcoming book chapter, this paper discusses how the development of an overall framing vision for student success, the implementation of evidence-based practices, and the establishment of a culture that is conducive to innovation can help colleges improve student outcomes.

Drawing on interviews with 96 first-year community college students, this journal article compares the roles of students' on- and off-campus relationships in providing information and support.

This practitioner packet provides guidance to colleges seeking to redesign their new student onboarding practices to better help students explore, choose, and plan a program of study best suited to their interests and aspirations.

This paper describes the professional development model used in CUNY Start, a program developed at the City University of New York to support entering students identified as academically underprepared in literacy and mathematics.

This paper discusses what is known about humanities coursework in community colleges, outlines key challenges facing humanities education in this sector, and considers approaches to addressing these challenges

This report builds off previous research on American Honors to look at the unintended consequences of college promise programs for the economic mobility of high-achieving, low-income students.

This study compares the out-of-sample predictive power of early momentum metrics—13 near-term success measures suggested by the literature—with that of metrics from machine-learning-based models that employ approximately 500 predictors for community college credential completion.

This journal article explores similarities and dissimilarities of higher education policies in England and the United States with an eye to what each country can learn from the other regarding the reduction of social class and racial/ethnic differences in higher education access and success.

This report examines the efforts of six state higher education systems to improve student outcomes and close opportunity gaps in mathematics as part of a three-year project led by the Charles A. Dana Center at The University of Texas at Austin.

In this Innovative Higher Education article, the authors examine the development and dissolution of a partnership between a privately held firm and six community colleges, which had established honors programs with the goal of facilitating students' transfer to selective institutions.

Drawing on data from six community colleges, this paper estimates the effects of part-time faculty versus full-time faculty on students’ current and subsequent course outcomes in developmental and gateway courses and explores potential explanations for these effects.

This paper explores the dynamics in and around an institution that influence how advisors and students experience technology-mediated advising reforms, along with the opportunities and challenges these dynamics create for colleges.

This book chapter describes key principles of CCRC's evidence-based framework for advising redesign, which emphasizes a sustained, strategic, integrated, proactive, and personalized (SSIPP) approach to advising.

This report describes trends in key performance indicators among the 26 two- and four-year institutions that participated in the Integrated Planning and Advising for Student Success (iPASS) grant initiative from 2011 to 2017.

This study uses a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the efficacy of multiple measures assessment programs at five colleges in Minnesota and Wisconsin and also examines the implementation and cost of the programs.

This article discusses the origins, implementation, and impacts of neoliberal policies by examining the case of performance-based funding for higher education in the United States, Europe, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere. It provides recommendations for how to improve performance funding and how to construct policy models that go behind the narrow imaginings of neoliberal theory.

This paper examines the labor market gains for students who enrolled at for-profit colleges after beginning their postsecondary education in community college.

This CAPR report examines how four Texas community colleges implemented Dana Center Mathematics Pathways (DCMP) and the impact of DCMP on student outcomes over as many as four semesters. Costs of the initiative and student perspectives are also discussed.

This CAPR report documents developmental education practices used in broad-access two- and four-year colleges across the country based on a 2016 survey of public two- and four-year colleges and private, nonprofit four-year colleges as well as interviews with institutional and state leaders.

This handbook presents a wide range of research on adults who have low literacy skills. It looks at the cognitive, affective, and motivational factors underlying adult literacy; adult literacy in different countries; and the educational approaches being taken to help improve adults’ literacy skills.

In this short essay, Shanna Jaggars (coauthor of Redesigning America's Community Colleges) and Amanda Folk (head of teaching and learning at the Ohio State Libraries) discuss how librarians' expertise could be harnessed to support guided pathways reforms.

This research brief describes findings from a survey about mathematics course offerings at institutions in six states implementing mathematics pathways.

This essay compares broad academic and vocational program goals, embodied skills, tasks, and jobs, with a focus primarily on community college students.

This short report provides a rationale for implementing Lesson Study, a collaborative and structured professional development approach, in the community college context.

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, this CAPSEE working paper examines nonpecuniary labor market outcomes associated with different levels of postsecondary educational attainment.

This report and the five case studies that accompany it describe how institutions are managing the broad-based transformation of programs, student services, and related support systems using the guided pathways model.