Publications

This report describes strategies for providing purposeful dual enrollment, which better guides underserved students into degree- and career-connected education after high school, without shifting the cost burden onto students and families.

This paper documents the annual costs associated with six common community college success strategies; overall costs, the distribution of costs, and costs per student, as well as how costs are borne by various actors are identified.

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.

Using financial data from IPEDS, this ARCC Network brief examines what happened to community college revenue and student aid during the pandemic and assesses the importance of Higher Education Emergency Relief (HEER) funding for community colleges and their students.

This ARCC Network report examines how Higher Education Emergency Relief (HEER) funds were distributed to community colleges and the extent to which the colleges spent those funds. It also explores how HEER funding and spending patterns differed by institutional and student characteristics.

This ARCC Network brief describes Higher Education Emergency Relief funding the federal government provided to community colleges, and it provides a first look at how much funding was awarded to and spent by the colleges through February 2023.

This report describes the diversity and complexity of community college state finance systems, and how to identify the often competing incentives within them, by comparing the systems of three very different states: California, Ohio, and Texas.

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 and accompanying case studies describe how three small colleges have made large-scale changes in practice based on the guided pathways model and how they funded and are sustaining these changes to improve rates of student progression and completion.

This fact sheet describes how community colleges hold potential for diversifying the STEM workforce as well as the challenges that community college students face in completing STEM programs.

This policy fact sheet discusses revenue streams for community colleges, disparity in resources relative to public four-year colleges, and federal spending, including COVID-19 relief funding.

This fact sheet discusses the rate of borrowing among students in different sectors, how community college students can benefit from access to loans, and the wide disparities in default by race and income.

CCRC offers a short primer on the multiple missions of these institutions, what kinds of students they enroll, what outcomes they produce, and some of the major issues they face.

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 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 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 report describes the Mathematics Pathways to Completion project developed by the Charles A. Dana Center and the condititions that facilitate the statewide implementation of math pathways reforms.

This paper discusses the organization, roles, and contributions of community colleges, and it analyzes reforms that have been proposed and enacted to meet ongoing challenges.

In this Brookings report, the author examines the policy landscape and reviews available evidence to assess the potential benefits and costs of thinking beyond the box in college admissions. The author then offers six key findings that have emerged from this review.