Publications

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 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 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.

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 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.

This report for The Century Foundation's College Completion Series lays out the open questions on how to reform developmental education.

This CAPSEE working paper examines the effects of four-year to two-year college transfer on “struggling” students, or those who earned less than a 3.0 grade point average in the first term.

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 playbook is a practical guide to designing and implementing a key set of practices that will help community colleges and their four-year college partners improve bachelor’s completion rates for students who start at community colleges.

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

This paper discusses the implementation of modularized developmental mathematics reforms in North Carolina and Virginia, presents student outcomes for two distinct course structures, and considers the opportunities and challenges they present.

Using detailed administrative data from Virginia, this CAPSEE working paper examines how and why the community college pathway to a baccalaureate influences students’ degree attainment and short-term labor market performance.

In CCRC's 2016 newsletter, CCRC Director Thomas Bailey writes about the growth and influence of the guided pathways model.

In addition to drawing on the existing body of research on performance funding, this journal article reports data from a study of the implementation of performance funding in three leading states (Indiana, Ohio, and Tennessee) and its impacts on three universities and three community colleges in each state.

This brief examines the corequisite remediation model as it was implemented in Tennessee community colleges in fall 2015 and finds that it is more cost-effective than the prerequisite remediation model the colleges formerly used.

This study uses a regression discontinuity design to estimate the effect of participation in a mathematics transition course on college-level math outcomes in West Virginia for the 2011–12 and 2012–13 high school senior cohorts.

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.

This paper introduces an online course quality rubric addressing four quality areas, and it examines the relationship between each quality area and student end-of-semester performance.

This Corridors of College Success brief highlights challenges involved in collective impact work and provides a lens for understanding why well-intentioned collective impact efforts may not take root.

This Jobs for the Future publication proposes research-based milestones of student momentum from twelfth grade through the first year of college, and suggests ways that local high school and college partners can collaborate to support student success.

This brief, the second in CCRC’s Corridors of College Success series, describes the challenges that early-stage collective impact communities face as they work to identify potential backbone organizations and establish a backbone structure.

Based on research as well as discussion among researchers, practitioners, and policymakers from seven states, this overview summarizes the state of knowledge on transition courses.

Based on a qualitative study, this report describes the implementation of transition courses in English and math in California, New York City, Tennessee, and West Virginia.

This paper introduces a piecewise growth approach to analyzing labor market outcomes of students, and it discusses how insights gained from the approach can be used to strengthen econometric analyses of labor market returns.

This report uses five metrics to measure the effectiveness of two- and four-year institutions in enabling community college students to transfer to four-year institutions and earn bachelor’s degrees.

Based on administrative data from two state community college systems, this paper explores the relationship between earning a certificate and students’ post-college earnings and employment status.

This paper reports findings from a researcher-practitioner partnership that assessed the readiness for postsecondary reading and writing demands of 211 students in developmental reading and English courses in two community colleges.

In this National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper, the authors describe the barriers that students face during the transition to college and review the evidence on potential policy solutions.

This CAPSEE working paper examines the returns to education for large numbers of young workers in Arkansas over the period before, during, and after the Great Recession.

This CAPSEE working paper examines the returns to math courses relative to the returns to other courses for students who started their postsecondary education at community college.

Collective impact is a place-based model of educational and social intervention that aims to shift responsibility for improvement in outcomes from ...

Using data on students who entered community college and then transferred, this paper examines the impact on bachelor’s degree attainment of earning an associate degree before transferring to a four-year college.

Using data on students at nine community colleges, this paper examines enrollment patterns and outcomes of students who take noncredit courses, including those who intend to transition to the for-credit sector.

This CAPSEE working paper examines student outcomes at six community colleges in North Carolina that had co-located American Job Centers on their campuses.

This article uses qualitative data from a multi-campus study of instructional reform in developmental education to present a typology of questions raised by community college faculty teaching in reformed contexts.

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.

This practitioner packet summarizes CCRC’s research on remedial placement at community colleges and considers how including students’ high school transcript information in the assignment process could improve placement accuracy.

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.