Objective: In 2009, the Kentucky General Assembly found unacceptable and costly the ongoing high numbers of high school students requiring remediation once they enter higher education. The state passed legislation to better align secondary and college education, establishing a diagnostic cycle that would become its Targeted Interventions (TI)…

Objective: Students' enrollment intensity during their first academic semester and year are highly influential in their success and decisions to persist in community college. Limited research, however, has focused on understanding how students navigate the decision-making process of determining their credit load or how institutional support…

Objective: Strong institutional partnerships are critical to the transfer process for students because they can help ease navigation from one college to the next. This research seeks to better understand the nature of high-performing transfer partnerships, and the factors that can either promote or hinder their development. Methods: Drawing upon…

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…

Objective: Early college high schools (ECHSs) allow high school students to accumulate credit toward an associate degree at little or no cost, often through partnerships with community colleges. The goal is to facilitate students' socialization into higher education, or the process of learning the skills, knowledge, and dispositions required for…

Objective: We estimated the correlations between the "pathways" chosen by community college students--in terms of desired credentials and fields of study, as well as other choices and outcomes along the paths--and the attainment of credentials with labor market value. We focused on the extent to which there were recorded changes in…

Objective: To transfer, students often must navigate complex and imperfect information about credit transfer, bureaucratic hurdles, and conflicting degree requirements. This study examined how administrators and transfer personnel think about institutional online transfer resources and examined community colleges' online transfer information.…

Objective: Although immigrant students placed in English as a Second Language (ESL) sequence at community colleges are a growing student population, there is a dearth of research focused on these students in college. This study provides descriptive estimates of community college students' progression through the credit-earning ESL sequence and…

Objective: Problems with credit mobility, or the transfer of credits from a sending to a receiving institution, may be one reason why community college transfer students have low rates of bachelor's degree completion. This study investigates different policy approaches to credit mobility and how college staff and students experience transfer at…

Objective: This study examines the characteristics, course enrollment patterns, and academic outcomes of students who started their college careers in noncredit courses. Method: Drawing upon a rich dataset that includes transcript and demographic information on both for-credit and noncredit students in multiple institutions, this study explores…

To support the long-term success of underprepared students, many community colleges are experimenting with accelerated developmental education models, which allow students to complete remediation and enroll in college-level math and English within a shorter time frame. This study examines three developmental acceleration programs, including two in…

Objective: Statway is a community college pathways initiative developed by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching designed to accelerate students' progress through their developmental math sequence to acquiring college math credit in statistics. Statway is a multifaceted change initiative designed to address the complex problems…

Using data from the Virginia Community College System and building upon prior Florida-based research, this study examines whether student success course enrollment, as well as student and institutional characteristics, has positive associations with shorter-term student outcomes, including earning any college credits within the first year and…

Objective: Excess credits earned by college students, over and above those required to complete their programs of study, have become increasingly a subject of interest and concern. There has been almost no research on the extent of these credits. This study focuses on all of the associate degree programs within one state's community college system…

Objective: The proportion of high school students taking college courses (e.g., dual credit) is increasing and state and local policies are expanding, yet little is known about the effect of dual credit policies on key educational outcomes, including the effects for low-income students and students of color. The purpose of this study was to…