July 2019–June 2025
The Policy Lab is a research partnership between CCRC and the City University of New York (CUNY) to link and leverage administrative data from CUNY and other state government agencies to conduct high-quality research aimed at improving the academic and economic mobility outcomes of its students. We focus especially on understanding the determinants of successful transitions between college and career, and the extent to which shaping these transitions can promote students’ long-run success in the labor market.
The Policy Lab's work is centered on the following research activities: (1) creating additional measures of post-college outcomes and examining the role that the initial transition plays in longer-term outcomes; (2) examining the individual, demographic, and institutional factors that predict who will experience a successful transition out of college and whether there is any evidence of “undermatching” in this context (i.e., are there groups of students who systematically experience worse post-college outcomes than their academic record would predict?); (3) examining the role of CUNY colleges in preparing teachers for New York public schools and the returns to CUNY degrees in teacher education; and (4) evaluating the impact of specific interventions and experiences that may improve post-college transitions, particularly for disadvantaged groups.
The Policy Lab's research activities involve descriptive and predictive analyses of initial transitions out of college, decompositions of gaps in outcomes, and rigorous experimental and quasi-experimental evaluations of programs intended to improve postsecondary education outcomes and transitions into the labor market for traditional and non-traditional students.
This project is funded by Schmidt Futures with additional foundation support.
