Drawing on data from four large-scale surveys of community college students, faculty, and administrations, the Center explores the benefit potential of 13 promising practices for student success, with a particular focus on students’ early experiences within the college setting (e.g., assessment and course placement, first-year experiences, learning communities). The report includes specific examples of schools’ implementation of these practices and provides guidance on how colleges can design and bring their own programs to scale.

While community colleges nationwide struggle to figure out how best to increase completion rates for their students, one state has achieved high completion rates with its unique postsecondary education system. This case study describes the Tennessee Technology Centers and how these 27 institutions are organized, how they operate, and how they are able to achieve postsecondary success for their students. The report examines four highly integrated components of the Centers’ framework and how these components appear to be critical to producing high rates of completion and placement in relatively high-wage jobs. Through the description of this alternative approach to occupational education and the lessons learned by Tennessee Technology Centers, a working model for student success is offered.

In 2009, the Breaking Through initiative awarded grants to five participating schools to help them scale up their efforts in improving career and technical education for low-skilled students. The case studies presented here explore the strategic approaches of each school (e.g., financial incentives, advising and student supports, revised curricular alignment, external workforce partnerships) and the successes and challenges of bringing these efforts to scale.

An ever-evolving labor market requires that education and training keep up with changing demands to ensure that students and graduates are equipped to pursue and attain available jobs. This report discusses the challenges that postsecondary institutions have staying abreast of current labor market demands and offering courses that prepare students with the skills employers need. The author proposes that community colleges use online job advertisements to identify local hiring trends and skill requirements and use the findings to inform career pathway curricula. Additionally, the author presents three steps for analyzing online job ads, identifies features of actual online job sites that would enable this analysis, and describes five examples from the field.

Contrary to its original intentions, California’s Master Plan for Higher Education may actually be contributing to the state’s poor record of baccalaureate attainment. This paper presents four-year college enrollment and B.A. attainment data, and makes the case that California has not kept pace. Given the reality of cost feasibility, the authors review a variety of baccalaureate reform models — new types of intermediary, “hybrid” institutions — used in other states that California might consider for restructuring its existing postsecondary system and creating a more seamless process for students.

Certain false assumptions can undermine the implementation of lasting and effective change. The authors present the realities behind these “myths,” exploring what leadership actions are needed to assess and mitigate the risks involved in major organizational change. While presenting examples primarily from the corporate realm, the major ideas are applicable within an educational setting.

Transfer and articulation policies are intended to improve the rates of student transfer from community colleges to four-year colleges, but they may actually play a role in minimizing institutional costs. This brief examines the literature and finds that transfer and articulation policies between community colleges and four-year colleges does not seem to correspond with better outcomes for students. However, the authors discuss how these policies serve valuable administrative function and can maximize cost benefits by promoting consistency and reliability across all institutions. Specific examples include broadening the type of institutions that participate in the agreements and establishing a common course numbering across institutions to facilitate transfer of credits.

This literature review analyzes social science, education, and policy studies from the last 25 years to identify factors that contribute to and inhibit community college success. Focusing on aspects of opportunity structure, institutional policy, and student attributes, the author summarizes past research on issues such as governance, financial aid and economic hardship, developmental education, classroom practices, and academic preparation; offers brief notes on current promising reform initiatives; and outlines suggestions for future research.

Communities Learning in Partnership (CLIP) is an online learning community for the seven cities selected for the nine-month planning phase of a new, multi-year initiative of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Participating cities include: Dayton, Ohio; Jacksonville, Fla.; Mesa, Ariz.; New York City; Phoenix; Riverside, Calif.; and San Francisco. Membership is required for participation. 

Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 and institutional information from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, researchers examined various characteristics of community colleges—including size, demographics of student population, type of faculty employed, and finances—to identify those factors that affect students’ success.

As community colleges are working to improve student completion rates, it’s not often that college leaders can learn the collective views of their students about what’s working and not working for them at the institution. This report uses focus group data to describe the perspectives of community college students— current students, completers, and non-completers—and their community college experiences. Specifically, the authors identify findings as they relate to three areas: connection to information and supports, connection to instructional services, and connection to career and/or career exploration. In each area, the authors discuss students’ perspectives on the services that met their needs, key challenges they encountered, and suggestions for improving how colleges can be more proactive in anticipating student needs and engaging student learning.

While dual enrollment programs historically have focused on high-achieving students, these programs can benefit underperforming students as well, particularly when integrated with a career focus. This report examines eight dual-enrollment partnerships in California that included a career-focused strategy for engaging struggling students. The authors describe each partnership and discuss the program variations among them, including the advantages and disadvantages of particular program features related to location, instructors and pedagogy, and course selection and content, among others. These findings are lessons to be considered when redesigning a dual enrollment program.

Since 2009, six states have worked with the Developmental Education Initiative (DEI) to increase student success in completing developmental education and progressing toward a degree or certificate. This report shares information on the efforts of participant states in implementing DEI’s three-phase policy strategy that addresses data-driven improvement processes, financial investment to encourage innovation, and policy supports to reform college readiness and placement standards and performance funding.

FastStart is a program with a holistic approach designed to accelerate students through multiple semesters of developmental coursework. The program is based on research showing that students who need multiple developmental courses are at a greater risk of dropping out of college before completing degrees or certificates. This site provides an overview of CCD's program including details and guidance on getting started.

Adult learners pursuing their postsecondary degrees after time away from the classroom need additional support to stay in school, different from the traditional student. Common strategies for helping adult learners achieve their goals are innovative academic programming, increased and creative financial aid opportunities, and support services. This study examines another strategy, Prior Learning Assessment, or PLA, which is the process by which colleges evaluate for academic credit the college-level knowledge and skills an individual has gained outside of the classroom such as through employment, the military, or hobbies. The findings show positive outcomes for PLA students who, compared to non-PLA students, had higher degree-earning rates and earned degrees in less time, saving on costs to the individuals and the institutions. Additionally, the report discusses PLA methods offered among the 48 colleges and universities studied, characteristics of the adult learners who participate in PLA, and their college-going behavior.

A distillation of the paper of the same name, this presentation from the 2011 convention of the American Association of Community Colleges explores the importance of tracking student progress toward entry in coherent programs of study and provides an overview of effective practices to enact at each phase to improve students’ success.

This report examines the implementation of Florida’s developmental education policies at three community colleges with high success rates among developmental education students. These colleges exhibit the same characteristics as those identified by the research literature on high-performing colleges: committed leadership, innovative instruction, proactive student support, regular use of data, and professional development. The authors discuss Florida’s statewide mandates in developmental education on issues of assessment and placement, literacy and math competencies, funding formulas, and accountability, and suggest how other states can learn from their policies.

Postsecondary institutions are faced with the tremendous challenge of how to improve student persistence. Open access institutions, which serve greater proportions of high-risk students, see even lower rates of retention and graduation than do selective institutions. Based on a study of four for-profit schools in Texas that had high graduation rates and low student loan default rates, this report describes what those institutions did to achieve such positive outcomes, particularly for these high-risk students. This study finds that among these institutions, a combination of key institutional practices aimed at retaining and graduating students along with establishment of a culture that emphasizes completion and job placement contributed to these schools’ abilities to support postsecondary student success.

Far too many community college students, especially developmental education students, are at risk of failing, and thus at greater risk of not earning a living wage or advancing through job opportunities. This policy brief examines the challenges of developmental education and the efforts that states can pursue to increase the success of students enrolled in remedial courses, leading to improved rates of transition to credit-bearing courses. The authors recommend that state policymakers consider policy changes affecting data systems, assessment and placement, concurrent developmental and college-level course taking, financial aid eligibility, support services, and funding for new models of delivery. These recommendations are discussed along with brief examples of what a few states have done to increase student transition out of developmental education.

The wide range of educational opportunities provided at community colleges make them an ideal resource for immigrant populations. However, many schools struggle to meet the unique needs of immigrant students. This report identifies common challenges immigrant students face (e.g., language barriers, late entry to postsecondary education, financial hardship, or gaps in cultural or academic knowledge) and offers an 11-point framework schools can use to guide their efforts to better meet students’ needs. For each item described in the framework, the author provides examples of successful implementation.

Improving student success in developmental education across an entire state's community college system is an ambitious plan. This report explains how a participatory process involving teachers and administrators as stakeholders, enabled developmental education reform in the Virginia community college system. The author discusses how the reform initiative began with using the statewide student data system to identify the issues: reduce the need for remediation, shorten the time spent in developmental education, and increase college completion rates for students who start out in developmental education. The author describes how redesign teams dramatically reconceived developmental mathematics and developmental English and implemented a common placement assessment that yielded formative data aligned with the new courses to increase college readiness for students.

Traditional semester-length developmental math courses are often unsuccessful in helping students gear up for college-level work, in part because students have varying competencies and skill gaps that can’t be properly addressed within the strictures of the course. This piece profiles three community colleges’ efforts to redesign remediation in math to allow for self-pacing by students and targeting specific individual needs. The authors also explore the issues involved in scaling up these programs to serve statewide community college systems.

This report describes the efforts of one school district on the Texas-Mexico border that implemented dual enrollment and career pathway programs districtwide and successfully turned around a district known for high dropout rates and high populations of low-income students and second language learners who did not go on to college. The author describes how the district created rigorous career pathways and a range of early college options, and then explores the instructional changes in the classrooms implemented to prepare students for the challenges of college-level work.

Community colleges are charged with improving efficiency, but the definition of efficiency is ambiguous.

This paper discusses how the various sectors of decisionmakers concerning the community college system use different measures to assess community college efficiency — policymakers focus on the fiscal costs, college leaders focus on the social costs of a degree. Based on a review of the literature on efficiency measures of community college performance, the author proposes a measure for efficiency analysis that considers both fiscal and social costs, but not without shortcomings given the constraints of the available data (IPEDS data).

MiraCosta Community College's Credit ESL Program focuses on providing advanced skill development and College Academic Preparation to students whose first language is other than English.  This program provides students with the tools and techniques they need to reach their goals, whether they be academic preparation, workplace improvement, or personal enrichment.

The nation has gaping economic needs that with training and education, could be filled by disconnected youth returning to school. This report offers a model based on successes in creating aligned pathways between community-based organizations, school districts, and postsecondary institutions targeted at putting off-track high school students and returning dropouts back on track through their first year of college. The Back on Track model features enriched and accelerated academic preparation, postsecondary bridging, and first-year supports. The authors present examples of current partnerships that work together to create this bridge, as well as policies to support the scaling up of this model

As states are looking into how to strengthen their student data and performance measurement systems to track student progress and success, they are in need of best practices that are taking root in other states. Based on a set of indicators identified by seven Achieving the Dream states focused on developing and improving their data systems, this policy brief describes the essential features that a state should consider when building or modifying its performance measurement and data systems, as well as the research capacity to support data-driven improvement strategies. Goldberger describes 10 performance measurement features, seven data system features, and four research capacity features along with examples of how other states are effectively demonstrating each particular feature.

Since higher education funding is based on student enrollment rather than student success, there is little incentive for colleges and universities to improve, much less measure, student outcomes. Aware of the need for higher education to change its focus, this study analyzed the higher education accountability systems of all fifty states to uncover the kind of information a state gathers about its colleges and students, and how it uses the information to make colleges and students more successful. The report describes the current state of higher education accountability — highlighting best practices already in use — and offers a set of guidelines for designing a model state higher education accountability system.

Community colleges are currently faced with the challenge of raising their graduation rates while dealing with budget cuts. To increase student achievement without requiring large amounts of additional funding, schools need to be particularly attentive to their organizational practices. Drawing postsecondary, K–12, and non-education sector research, this report examines the practices commonly seen in high-performing organizations, including functional alignment, use of data in improvement efforts, and employee engagement and training. The author focuses his recommendations on those practices that support a continuous cycle of improvement.

Although California enjoys high enrollment rates, it has state policies that act as barriers to completion, resulting in poor completion rates. This policy brief describes how available data on demographics and course-taking behavior of California community college students could inform new policy focused on increasing college completion rates. Knowing that certain enrollment patterns are related to higher completion rates, the authors discuss how new policy could be aimed at encouraging those behaviors to lead to increased student success.

Too many students enter community college needing developmental education, and many are at risk of leaving school before ever reaching college-level coursework. This brief describes how 15 states participating in the Achieving the Dream initiative have concentrated their efforts to change state policy in four broad strategies aimed at improving outcomes for underprepared students: preventative strategies, assessment and placement, implementation and evaluation of program innovation, and performance measurement and incentives. Collins shares results and lessons learned from the innovations and promising practices of high-performing institutions and the critical role that state policy plays in developing the conditions that support change.

Navigating the college process is challenging enough for most students, but first-generation college students often have additional circumstances that make the process even more challenging. This brief, prepared for institutions working on increasing capacity for supporting underserved students, or Minority-Serving Institutions, provides an overview of existing programs and resources aimed at supporting this particular population of postsecondary students. The report offers promising classroom-based practices and examples from institutions participating in the Walmart Minority Student Success Initiative toward the effort of improving first-generation student success.

As large proportions of students arrive to college — especially community colleges — unprepared for the rigor of college-level coursework, states are turning to assessments as a critical tool for increasing college readiness. This report describes how Florida’s Division of Colleges partnered with K–12 using the state’s rich K–20 longitudinal student data to design and implement a new 11th grade college placement test that simultaneously places students in remedial or college-level courses and measures high school students’ college readiness. Based on interviews conducted for this case study, the author discusses the changes made at both the secondary and postsecondary levels statewide, reflecting an alignment of standards, ownership of the issues by faculty, and a collaboration across these two sectors to reduce remediation and accelerate developmental instruction.

In Massachusetts, as in most states, there is an economic urgency in the next decade to educate students prepared for the changing workforce, one which requires the completion of some postsecondary education. This report relies on previous studies to create momentum around a new effort to align postsecondary education and training in Massachusetts’s 15 community colleges with the state’s workforce development needs. The authors discuss how Massachusetts’s community college system compares to others as far as governance and funding, and present effective systems that are currently meeting the workforce needs in other states. They also describe innovative programs within individual community colleges in Massachusetts that could serve as models for workforce programs and partnerships, as well as the challenges to systemic improvement in aligning community colleges to the Commonwealth state’s workforce needs.

A November 2010 meeting of the American Association of Community Colleges provided the opportunity for members to focus on four major completion-related topics: commitment, accountability for outcomes, toolkits, and overcoming obstacles. This report summarizes the meeting sessions, including the key points raised, suggestions for improvement, and examples of work currently being done.

In the U.S., K–12 and postsecondary education are disjointed, creating barriers that hinder students — especially lesser-prepared students — from successfully navigating the transition to and through higher education. Based on a four-state study that analyzed K–16 educational governance and state policies in areas such as finance, curricula and assessment, accountability, and data systems, this report proposes a set of policy levers for states interested in K–16 reform. In addition to providing examples of the steps several states have taken to move the K–16 agenda forward, the authors also offer recommendations to help states formalize current approaches into more effective, sustainable, and long-term governance structures and policies for improving success opportunities for students.

In the past twenty years, many school reform models have been initiated to improve college preparation, access, and success for underserved students. This paper examines the predictors of college-going behavior and how they have been addressed within the high school reform movement. The authors review and analyze a variety of school reform initiatives including AVID, Talent Development High Schools, International Baccalaureate, Project GRAD, and GEAR UP, among others. The authors extrapolate promising practices from existing reform initiatives and make recommendations for addressing the predictors of college-going behavior. Among the predictors, the authors find that academic rigor and strong social and academic support are the most crucial predictors of a student’s successful enrollment in, and completion of, postsecondary education.

The developmental education process is fraught with challenges that act as barriers to student success. This report proposes a framework comprising three sets of opposing forces for understanding the dysfunction of the developmental system. The authors outline the framework and then, using CUNY as a case study, describe how each of the three sets of tensions shape policies, practices, and student progression patterns in developmental education. Finally, based on the CUNY case study, the authors discuss suggestions for reconciling the opposing forces involving consistency with flexibility, efficient assessment aligned with treatment, and support for progression while maintaining academic standards.

The Puente Project is a national award-winning program with the mission to increase the number of educationally disadvantaged students who enroll in four-year colleges and universities, earn college degrees and return to the community as mentors and leaders to future generations. The program is interdisciplinary in approach, with writing, counseling and mentoring components.

The structure hypothesis argues that community college students are more likely to succeed when offered a highly structured program of study that makes clear the path to completion and reduces bureaucratic barriers. Using existing research this report examines the decision-making processes that students must go through to successfully navigate college and the psychological impacts of making these decisions in a low-structure context. The author then reviews several methods that schools might consider implementing to provide students with a more structured, easier to navigate college experience, including revised curriculum design and improved access to information.

This publication is intended as a supplement to the main study report, Passing the Torch: Strategies for Innovation in Community College ESL by Chisman and Crandall. It presents in-depth profiles of the five college programs whose adult ESL services were studied and found to be innovative and successful in terms of learning gains, student retention, and transitions to further education. Specifically, each profile addresses ESL programs, noncredit ESL program characteristics, special program features, use of technology, articulation and transitions, faculty, management, finance and program effectiveness.

Among states, there is growing interest in providing new incentives to community college systems for improving college completion, but there are few resources available. This brief presents a set of tools that can help states design performance-based funding systems to influence student and institutional behavior. The first tool is a set of reflections based on Ohio’s new performance-based funding system that shifted its focus from course enrollment to course completion. The second tool is a set of recommendations to guide state leaders through design and implementation issues, especially related to challenges of equity, sustainability and political buy-in. The last tool is a matrix that summarizes similarities and differences among the Achieving the Dream states that have performance-based funding for their community colleges.

Improving the success of college completion and transfer rates requires new innovations aimed exactly at those efforts. This report profiles five California community colleges that have implemented practices or programs focused on completion and transfer to a four-year university or the workforce. Additionally, this report presents four commonalities, based on the work of these community colleges, that serve as a framework for any effort to improve student success: information matters, working together, supporting students outside the classroom, and college leaders are key.

Prepared by WestEd, this memo provides a summary of the report "Winning by Degrees: The Strategies of Highly Productive Higher-Education Institutes."