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This study seeks to identify policies and practices of community colleges that are effective in enabling their students to succeed in postsecondary education. [The] study builds on earlier research the Community College Research Center (CCRC) has done using national survey data. We used transcript-level data on 150,000 students in three cohorts of first-time Florida community college students and a regression methodology to estimate the effect that each of the 28 Florida community colleges has on the probability of its students' achieving a successful outcome, after controlling for characteristics of the individual students. This effect can be seen as a measure of value added - the impact that a college has on its students' educational success independent of the characteristics of individual students. We then ranked the colleges according to their estimated effects on student success. [Colleges were selected] for field research using rankings of the magnitude of the effect of each institution on the probability that the African American and Latino students would attain successful outcomes. In Florida, as in other states, African American and Latino community college students are less likely than other students to complete degrees or to transfer to baccalaureate programs. At the same time, because we are interested in what colleges are doing to retain students generally, we also examined each institution's impact on outcomes for all first-time students. We used these rankings along with an analysis of descriptive statistics on each institution to select six colleges for field research: three that have higher impacts on the chances that their minority students succeed and three that have lower impacts. The purpose of the field work was to compare the institutional policies, practices and cultural characteristics of the high- and low-impact colleges during the period in which the student cohorts were tracked (1998-99 through 2002-03) to determine why some colleges had a greater net effect on their minority students' educational success than did others.