Community colleges increasingly turn to various types of student success courses for their potential as high-impact practices to foster college completion. Despite commonly held assumptions of what characterizes these interventions, upon close inspection there is an un-scrutinized, circular confounding of their goals and means, which limits the ability of educators to design, deliver, and assess them adequately. In this mixed methods study of 45 community college student success programs across the U.S., we show how a sociocultural perspective helps to clarify the espoused versus enacted curriculum of student success courses and to explain the problematic tendency to continuously expand their curricular scope. Additionally, findings reveal the latent salience that instructors place on developing self-awareness and a college-going identity, notions rarely invoked as justification for student success courses to the same degree as instrumentalist notions of skills, navigation, and career planning valued by the traditional completion agenda discourse.