Recent research suggests that dual enrollment programs are a useful recruiting tool for colleges and universities as many high school students remain at their dual enrollment institution after high school graduation. Students staying enrolled at their dual enrollment institution for college may be beneficial for institutions, but is it beneficial…

Objective: Dual enrollment has become a significant portion of community college enrollment throughout the country. Some scholars have argued that dual enrollment implementation can be used as a viable policy lever to achieve the certificate and associate degree obtainment outcomes identified in "Reclaiming the American Dream," a…

Decades of research have estimated the effect of entering a community college on bachelor's degree attainment. In this study, we examined the influence of methodological choices, including sample restrictions and identification strategies, on estimated effects from studies published between 1970 and 2017. After systematically reviewing the…

Objective: This study examines how accurately a small set of short-term academic indicators can approximate long-term outcomes of community college students so that decision-makers can take informed actions based on those indicators to evaluate the current progress of large-scale reform efforts on long-term outcomes, which in practice will not be…

Deregulation of for-profit colleges led to a precipitous rise in enrollments from 1990 to 2010. Since 2010, regulation, investigations, and sanctions have led to enrollment declines in for-profit postsecondary institutions. Initially barred from receiving Title IV federal funds, in the form of Pell Grants and Stafford Loans, for-profit colleges…

In this article, I utilize a regression discontinuity design to estimate the effects of Tulsa Achieves--a prevalent and understudied type of tuition-free college program. In contrast to concerns regarding tuition-free community college suppressing bachelor's degree attainment, I find that Tulsa Achieves increased the likelihood of transferring to…

Colleges offer remedial coursework to help students enrolling in post-secondary education who are not adequately prepared to succeed in college-level courses. Despite the prevalence of remediation, previous research presents contradictory findings regarding its short- and long-term effects. This paper uses a doubly robust inverse probability…

College graduation rates in the United States are low in both real and relative terms. This has left all stakeholders looking for novel solutions while perhaps ignoring extant but underused programs. This article examines the effect of "summer bridge" programs, which have students enroll in coursework prior to beginning their first full…

The present paper determines whether community college transfer students have higher baccalaureate rates when they enroll in four-year colleges and departments that have larger shares of transfer students. Transfers attending non-technical campuses with larger shares of transfers have higher eight-year baccalaureate rates, but within-campus…

The Indiana Commission for Higher Education is committed to providing a clearer and more comprehensive picture of college completion in order to inform and advance Indiana's collective efforts to boost education attainment. In partnership with Indiana public colleges and the National Student Clearinghouse, the Commission has collected completion…

This paper uses the credits-attempted perspective--in the context of how many credits a student attempts in their first year of college--and reports on several related projects all intended to evaluate potential interventions to raise academic momentum among first-year community college students. The presentation contrasts non-experimental…

The Indiana Commission for Higher Education is committed to providing a clearer and more comprehensive picture of college completion in order to inform and advance Indiana's collective efforts to boost education attainment. In partnership with Indiana public colleges and the National Student Clearinghouse, the Commission has collected completion…

The summer school sessions that colleges offer their undergraduates are sometimes considered supplementary activities and are rarely perceived as central to a college's mission or effectiveness. However, analyses of college transcript data that tracked a nationally-representative sample of undergraduates for several years and through multiple…

Due in large part to their open access and affordability, community colleges have long played a central role in providing students with immigrant backgrounds who are English language learners (ELLs) with access to postsecondary education. Researchers have noted that English as a second language (ESL) courses have been the primary form of support…