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This study compares the impact of timing of registration on the student learning outcomes of students taking courses at three rural community colleges in the southeastern U.S. during the school years 2001-2003. Findings from this study indicate that early registration has a positive influence on students' grades and course completion rates. Also contributing to differences in student outcomes were student race, Pell Grant status, gender, program of study, and age.

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With the growing attention the public is paying to community colleges, it is important to remember just whom community colleges serve, noting what is distinctive and what has changed about this population. In this brief, [the author] consider[s] the unique variety of students who are drawn to and served by community colleges. Community college students have a greater proportion of students with various risk factors when compared to all of higher education. These colleges also provide access to nearly half of all minority undergraduate students and more than 40 per cent of undergraduate students living in poverty. Community colleges are open access and do not, with the rare exception, build a student body. As this brief points out, the open door philosophy not only benefits students attending community colleges, but also benefits other sectors of higher education.

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Until recently, the vast majority of California's community college students - hundreds of thousands of students each year - started in remedial courses that slowed down or halted their academic progress. Attrition was high, particularly for Latino and African American students. Few students went on to complete the gateway courses necessary to transfer to a four-year college (known as transfer-level courses). After years of important but piecemeal reforms, in 2017 a landmark law (AB 705) transformed placement and remediation at the state's community colleges. Students are no longer asked to prove they are ready for gateway courses. Instead, colleges must prove if students are not ready. We examine how AB 705 transformed student access, outcomes, and racial equity in fall 2019, the deadline for implementation.

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The Working Poor Families Project (WPFP) supports efforts by state nonprofit organizations to strengthen state policies that can help low-income workers achieve economic security and become productive participants in the economy. WPFP encourages its partners to engage with state policymakers to ensure that state controlled resources support broader access to college and higher rates of persistence and completion among students of all ages. It is essential to communicate the importance of lifelong learning to policymakers, leaders of P-12 and higher education systems, and to prospective students. Higher education is no longer a rite of passage for recent high school graduates, but a resource for adults to draw upon at any age, often many times during a career. This policy brief identifies opportunities for strengthening state implementation of the [College Access Challenge Grant] CACG program to support the educational needs of low-skilled and disadvantaged adults. Show less

In an effort to increase college access and success rates, the state of Texas has expanded dual enrollment programs and Early College High Schools (ECHS) that provide students with the opportunity to begin their collegiate careers while still in high school. More recently, these dual enrollment and ECHS programs have tried to broaden inclusion among at-risk high school students and student dropouts. Using institutional data from a high school district and a community college located within a suburban region of Texas, this study aimed to determine which students benefited most from these early college access initiatives. Collective results from the descriptive and logistic regression analysis revealed equity gaps in participation among Black and socioeconomically disadvantaged students. While dual enrollment participation was associated with higher odds of postsecondary matriculation, ECHS students matriculated at markedly lower rates. Based upon these findings, the paper offers recommendations for policy changes and institutional practices that can increase college access among traditionally underserved student populations.

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Objective: An increasing number of states are adopting performance-based funding (PBF) systems for their public colleges, but there are concerns that PBF dissuades colleges from recruiting and enrolling students with a lower likelihood of success. Some states have attempted to address this concern by providing additional funds for successfully serving low-income, underrepresented minority, or adult students, but the effectiveness of these particular provisions has yet to be examined among 2-year colleges. I explore whether these provisions have affected historically underrepresented student enrollments at community colleges. Method: I use generalized difference-in-difference panel regression techniques combined with data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System and information from states on their performance funding policies from the 2004-2005 to 2014-2015 academic years to address the research questions. I classified colleges based on whether they had a PBF system with equity provisions, a PBF system without equity provisions, or no PBF in a given year and compared these three groups of institutions. Results: I find little evidence that PBF policies, regardless of their design characteristics, have a relationship with traditionally underrepresented student enrollment levels. Contributions: Although there are concerns that PBF systems induce community colleges to selectively recruit students with a higher probability of success, I find no systemic evidence of that practice. However, as PBF systems become higher stakes and more ingrained in state higher education funding, this finding deserves further study.

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At a time when the nation is focusing so much attention on college completion, what [is known] about how students are completing their community college programs? Does the open-access mission of community colleges translate into equitable outcomes? Pathways to Results (PTR) engages practitioners in using data to close equity gaps for student groups historically underserved by postsecondary education. This chapter describes the experiences of practitioners at Richland Community College who implemented PTR to improve student access, outcomes, and equity in an associate degree nursing program.

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This study analyses the perspectives of four stakeholder groups towards applied baccalaureate (AB) degrees in the United States. Perspectives towards AB degrees that are held by community college personnel, university personnel, employers and student participants are analysed using the Policy Narrative Framework. Findings show the stakeholder groups hold common as well as contrasting perspectives on the contributions of AB degrees to college access, completion and progression to employment. Community college AB degree participants, the preponderance of whom represents historically underserved student groups, appreciate the flexible scheduling, applied learning and workforce relevance of these degrees, and they perceive that community colleges are advocates, or heroes, in helping them obtain AB degrees that will get them a good job.

However, community college and university personnel view AB degrees differently, with community college personnel seeing them as having reasonable costs and wide benefits and universities seeing them as having high costs and narrow benefits. Employers have limited understanding of AB degrees yet tend to view them favourably, including the benefit of encouraging local economic and community development. Despite these perceived benefits, the authors conclude that AB degrees remain a contested second-order change to higher education that is yet to demonstrate results to improving the educational attainment and social mobility of undeserved students.

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The degree to which students are able to make adequate repayments on their student loans and avoid default is of special concern for colleges. If too many former students go into default, the college will face sanctions by the federal government and lose eligibility to provide currently enrolled students federal financial aid, such as the Pell grant. To avoid these sanctions, some colleges have chosen not to participate in federal loan programs by excluding loans from students' financial aid packages. In this article, [the author] investigates the student-level impacts associated with the decision of community colleges to opt out of the Stafford loan program. Utilizing administrative records from over 50 community colleges located in a single state, [the author] estimates the within-college differences in outcomes for Pell-eligible students before and after an institution opts out of the federal loan program. [The author] finds that Pell-eligible students enrolling when the community college offered federal loans were 7.6 percentage points more likely to borrow than Pell-eligible students who enrolled when the institutions opted out. Overall, borrowing also increased by 368 US dollars a year. [The author] also finds that students borrowing a loan attempted 19 additional credits in their first year of enrollment and were more likely to attempt and complete math and science courses than non-borrowers.

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In 2007, Washington State launched an innovative performance incentive policy for community colleges, called the Student Achievement Initiative (SAI). The purpose of the SAI is to use data and performance funding to motivate colleges to implement systemic changes in practice that lead to improved student outcomes. The SAI seeks to address some of the key shortcomings of previous state higher education performance incentive policies and so has attracted a lot of interest from policymakers and funders nationally. By drawing on initial observations from our ongoing evaluation of the SAI as well as knowledge about earlier generation performance funding policies attempted elsewhere, this brief aims to inform the conversation currently going on in many states about using state policy levers to meet ambitious state and national goals for increased college attainment. To that end, this brief calls particular attention to a number of policy choices that the Washington community and technical college system faced as it designed and began to implement the SAI across its 34 colleges.

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