Publications

This Center on Poverty and Social Policy working paper estimates the incremental long-run benefits and costs of participation in CUNY’s Accelerate, Complete, and Engage program, aimed at increasing bachelor’s completion rates.

This journal article describes the design of the Caring Campus–Faculty program, presents findings from four years of research on important practices and outcomes, and describes implementation experiences at one college that adopted the program.

Using administrative data, this paper analyzes Get a Skill, Get a Job, Get Ahead (G3)—a free community college initiative that Virginia implemented in 2021—and shows that both institutions and students responded to the tuition-free messaging and eligibility criteria.

This ARCC Network brief uses enrollment and outcome data as well as interview data from eight colleges implementing the Get A Skill, Get A Job, Get Ahead (G3) program to examine college-level G3 outreach, recruitment, and enrollment strategies and the process for awarding G3 aid.

This book chapter explores the personal support networks and help-seeking preferences of immigrant-origin, first-generation-in-college students (FGCS) as part of a three-year longitudinal mixed-methods study with FGCSs at four public Hispanic-serving institutions in California.

Based on interview data, this report examines a set of seven strategies that presidents of community colleges implementing Caring Campus are using to develop a more positive college culture and to support this culture-focused reform.

This fact sheet discusses how important Pell Grants are for community college students and describes recent and proposed changes in the Pell Grant program.

Using administrative data from the City University of New York (CUNY), this paper examines the impact of the summer Pell program on community college student persistence, completion, and employment outcomes.

Using three case studies, this paper examines the conditions under which dual enrollment programming could be made sustainable through efficiency gains, even for colleges that charge discounted tuition (or none at all)

This report shares results of research undertaken to understand what five iPASS institutions were doing before and during the iPASS grant period to advise and support Black, Latinx, and low-income students both in and outside the classroom.

Caring Campus/Faculty is a program aimed at increasing students’ connection to college; this report shares findings from a study on how it is being adopted at several colleges, including insights into effective faculty engagement and implementation.

Based on fieldwork at six institutions, this report describes how colleges are implementing Caring Campus/Staff, a program designed to engage nonacademic staff in improving interactions with students and fostering a culture of caring at community colleges.

This fact sheet describes the importance of academic and nonacademic services, particularly for underserved students, and how students that receive targeted, intensive support experience improved outcomes.

This fact sheet outlines how the Federal Work-Study program works, its effects on academic and labor market outcomes, and why so few community college students receive Federal Work-Study aid.

This report examines how Ohio community colleges—which have been engaged in guided pathways reform for several years—are innovating within the model to provide scaled, personalized support to help students gain early academic momentum.

This set of three studies examines what states and community colleges can do to address the needs of racially minoritized adult learners who are pursuing postsecondary education and training as a path to re-employment, better jobs, and higher incomes.

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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 report shares the stories of four community colleges that participated in the Integrated Planning and Advising for Student Success (iPASS) initiative, which provided support for institutions as they redesigned their advising processes and adopted and implemented new technologies.

This study, conducted in partnership with MDRC, examines the effects of three institutions’ efforts to expand the use of advising technologies and to use administrative and communication strategies to increase student contact with advisors.

This brief examines the expansion and adaptation of the City University of New York’s Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP), using Bronx Community College as an illustrative case study.

This paper illustrates student responses to Satisfactory Academic Progress (SAP) requirements as well as the tradeoffs faced by a social planner weighing whether to set performance standards in the context of need-based aid.

This paper employs a difference-in-difference approach to examine the credit, credential completion, and labor market outcomes resulting from the year-round Pell using a state administrative dataset from a community college system.

This report describes how three institutions—the University of North Carolina, Charlotte; California State University, Fresno; and Montgomery County Community College in Pennsylvania—are approaching comprehensive, technology-based advising reforms.

This Brookings Institution report uses data from the U.S. Department of Education to examine whether disparities in student loan default rates by race/ethnicity and institution sector can be explained by other factors, along with what happens after a default and whether this also varies across student subgroups.

This paper looks at baseline key performance indicators (KPIs) for 26 two- and four-year institutions that received grants to implement technology-mediated advising reforms.

This CCRC working paper examines the perspectives of college personnel engaged in the consideration, launch, and use of predictive analytics tools for targeted advising.

This paper describes how degree-seeking students at the City Colleges of Chicago make choices about their programs in their first year of enrollment, focusing especially on how they interact with advisors and how they use college-based resources in program selection and program planning.

In this Brookings report, the author analyzes new data on student debt and repayment released by the U.S. Department of Education in October 2017. The author then provides five key findings based on this analysis.

With the goal of informing federal higher education policy decisions, this brief for the Urban Institute suggests federal student aid reform that simplifies the eligibility and application process.

This set of tools aims to help community colleges and broad-access four-year colleges assess their work on technology-mediated advising and student support, sometimes referred to as Integrated Planning and Advising for Student Success (iPASS).

Using interview data from students at three community colleges, this paper examines shifts in confidence that students experience early in their college careers.

This study explores the influence of different types of leadership approaches on the implementation of a technology-mediated advising reform at six colleges, and assesses which types of leadership are associated with transformative organizational change.

This review draws from the experiences of colleges awarded the Kisco Foundation’s Kohlberg Prize to highlight the practical and philosophical challenges involved in creating integrated services for student veterans.

This Brookings report discusses what role the Federal Work-Study program might have in a modern “college completion and career readiness” agenda.

This paper provides an overview of undergraduate financial aid to inform discussions of the future of undergraduate education in the United States and the role of financial aid within it.

Based on recent CAPSEE studies in two states, this brief discusses the motivations for satisfactory academic progress requirements for federal aid, examines how community college students are affected, and assesses the implications for program efficiency and equity.

This brief discusses current research, including CAPSEE analysis, regarding both the effectiveness of the Federal Work-Study (FWS) program and its equity in terms of the distribution of funds.

Using an administrative data set from one state, this paper examines the effects of receiving a modest Pell Grant on financial aid packages, labor supply while in school, and academic outcomes for community college students.

This practitioner packet summarizes CCRC’s research on technology-mediated advising reform and discusses how institutions are attempting to transform advising systems so that they can support a more intensive and personalized case-management model.

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.