Publications

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 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 short paper identifies states in which local and statewide efforts have been made to implement early college readiness assessments and transition curricula.

Based on a case study of the City University of New York's six community colleges, this publication identifies the conflicting motivations that shape developmental education reform efforts.

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.

In CCRC's 2013 newsletter, Director Thomas Bailey discusses CCRC’s recent research on online education and nonacademic skills and argues that to maximize the potential of online learning, community colleges need to bolster supports for students and instructors.

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.

This practitioner packet summarizes CCRC findings on online course outcomes and presents insights and recommendations for administrators and instructors seeking to improve online student performance.

Based on findings from a three-year study of Washington State’s Student Achievement Initiative, this policy brief offers lessons for state leaders seeking to design effective higher education performance funding systems.

In response to a journal article questioning CCRC’s claims about the effectiveness of developmental education, this essay discusses methodological concerns and other issues that may be a source of confusion.

This NCPR working paper outlines the development of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the CCSS-aligned assessments and argues that they can be used to support the mission of community colleges.

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

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

This report discusses the development of FastStart, its program features, and student perspectives, and it presents findings from a quantitative analysis of the FastStart math program.

This report makes a series of policy recommendations for strengthening dual enrollment in Tennessee to ensure that the program contributes to Tennessee's college completion goals.

The Developmental Education Initiative provided funding to 15 colleges to implement or scale up developmental reform strategies. This report examines the implementation of these strategies.

This article discusses political forces that shaped performance funding policies in eight states: Florida, Illinois, Missouri, South Carolina, Tennessee, Washington, California, and Nevada.

This chapter reviews the literature on online learning in community colleges, focusing online course-taking patterns, performance in online versus face-to-face courses, and factors affecting online course performance.

This issue of Inside Out explores how developmental education reforms can create opportunities for faculty to engage in professional learning related to instruction.

This report assesses how and to what extent the Student Achievement Initiative has encouraged two-year public colleges in Washington State to take steps to improve student achievement.

This report describes the progress of six colleges in implementing Achieving the Dream’s “culture of evidence” principles for institutional improvement and charts trends in student outcomes over time.

This NCPR working paper documents the implementation of capstone courses in English and mathematics at more than 20 high schools across Virginia.

This report seeks to understand those aspects of the Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training (I-BEST) program that best support student learning, progression, and completion.

This paper presents the findings from a follow-up quantitative analysis of the Community College of Baltimore County’s Accelerated Learning Program (ALP).

Thomas Bailey and Clive Belfield consider the role of community colleges, with particular attention to the benefits to workers (as measured by earnings) of certificates and degrees by field of study.

This paper offers methods for identifying introductory courses that are obstacles to college completion, and the relative extent of the obstacle each poses.

This paper describes a range of approaches to improving poor course placement accuracy and inconsistent standards associated with traditional assessment and placement practices at community colleges.

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 structure of community college career-technical programs and its association with program completion.

This chapter discusses instructional approaches intended to prepare initially low-skilled college entrants for the reading, writing, and mathematics skills they need to learn from the postsecondary curriculum.

This paper finds that remediation does little to develop students' skills but does not discourage initial enrollment or persistence, except among students identified as potentially misassigned.

This NCPR working paper compares outcomes of students who participated in dual enrollment courses through the Concurrent Courses Initiative with those of similar students who did not participate.

The three-year study examined the outcomes of almost 3,000 students participating in eight dual enrollment programs across California.

This book chapter discusses community college graduation goals that have been set by the Obama administration, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Lumina Foundation for Education.

This NCPR report presents findings from an experimental study of eight developmental summer bridge programs offered in Texas during the summer of 2009.

This study examines 37 college readiness partnership programs in Texas and the partnerships that created them, identifying their key characteristics as well as benefits and challenges related to their implementation.

This article reviews previous studies on dual enrollment and discusses the results of an evaluation of College Now, the dual enrollment program of The City University of New York.

Using qualitative data from California's Concurrent Courses Initiative, this article explores how teaching in a dual enrollment program can foster new approaches to classroom pedagogy.

This chapter provides a theoretical framework through which to understand the experiences of dual enrollment students as they "try out" the role of college student.

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.

Commissioned by the Nashville Chamber of Commerce, this report reviews dual enrollment policies in Tennessee and five peer states—Florida, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, and Kentucky.

This paper examines the performance of Washington State’s two-year colleges under the Student Achievement Initiative, a policy to reward colleges for improvements in student achievement.

This paper documents the phenomenon of excess credits by examining the credit distributions of six cohorts of students in one state community college system.

In CCRC's 2012 newsletter, Director Thomas Bailey discusses CCRC’s research on developmental assessment and placement and how colleges might more effectively assess incoming students.

This paper gives a preferred economic definition of college efficiency—fiscal and social cost per degree—and assesses the validity of using IPEDS data to calculate efficiency for a community college system.