Publications

This new fact sheet explores students' basic needs—including nutrition, housing, childcare, transportation, and healthcare—and provides policy considerations for improving basic needs supports.

Using information and cost data from several CUNY campuses, this brief describes the FWS program’s core administrative components, estimates the campus costs of its implementation, and shows how program scale, staffing, and technology shape these costs.

Drawing on student surveys, staff interviews, and administrative data, this brief describes the pandemic-era evolution of the FWS program across multiple undergraduate CUNY colleges, highlighting institutional management challenges, student access issues, and common academic benefits of work-study jobs.

This new fact sheet explores student debt among community college students and provides policy considerations for supporting students in making informed borrowing decisions and successfully repaying their loans.

Drawing on three rounds of site visits to eight institutions, this brief examines how Virginia community colleges implemented G3 policy and offers lessons for developing, strengthening, and expanding access to short-term training programs for high-demand jobs.

This new fact sheet provides an overview of student parents and the challenges they face, and provides policy considerations for supporting student parents and improving their experiences.

This report uses student survey and interview data from four California colleges to examine how first-generation college students build relationships and use support networks on- and off-campus to address academic and nonacademic challenges in the first year of college.

Based on a review of relevant literature and interviews with experts and administrators, this report discusses how federal policy aims are addressed by AE ESL providers and the distinct role that community colleges play in delivering AE ESL programming.

Using administrative data tracking Federal Work Study (FWS) offers, enrollment, and participation from the date of application, this working paper studies the causal impacts of receiving an FWS offer at a large public college system, including both two- and four-year campuses.

Based on survey and interview data from first-generation students who stopped out of four colleges in California, this brief examines students’ reasons for leaving, the role their social networks played in informing or supporting their decision, and how they thought about their futures—including the possibility of reenrollment.

This practice guide builds on the work of colleges in the Unlocking Opportunity Network by offering practical strategies that can help more students graduate with credentials that lead directly to good jobs or transfer and successful attainment of a bachelor’s degree.

This report discusses the program choice process among 42 student interviewees; it describes factors that influenced their choice and how their choice often changed, and it offers recommendations to better support students in selecting a program.

Based on survey findings from 480 former students who stopped out of community college before the start of their second year, this report sheds light on the experiences of this population and their reasons for leaving college.

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.