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American Honors: The Life and Death of a Public-Private Partnership

By Shanna Smith Jaggars, Maggie P. Fay & Negar Farakish

In fall 2012, a public-minded privately held firm, Quad Learning, partnered with two community colleges to pilot a new program dubbed “American Honors” (AH), which was designed to help academically talented community college students overcome the challenges of transferring to more selective four-year destinations. By fall 2018, Quad Learning had dissolved the AH program for domestic students.

This paper traces the components of the program’s socially conscious theory of change, its for-profit business model, and the tensions between the two. The authors explore the meaning of AH’s various components to students, faculty, and administrators, estimate its impact on students’ academic outcomes, and offer takeaways for future public-private ventures.

Download CCRC Working Paper No. 108
May 2019
  • American Honors: Evaluation of a Community College Transfer Pathway Program

Related Publications

July 2022

“Lost in the Shuffle”: How Relationships and Personalized Advisement Shape Transfer Aspirations and Outcomes for Community College Students

April 2020

A Broken “Promise”? How College Promise Programs Can Impact High-Achieving, Middle-Income Students

February 2020

Public-Private Partnership: How and Why Six Community Colleges Loved and Left a For-Profit Partner

Additional Resources

For more policy briefs and fact sheets, visit CCRC’s Policy Resources page.

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