Objective: Despite community colleges accounting for 34% of all undergraduate enrollment, research on substance-use patterns among community college students is limited. Community college students may engage in substance use differently than their 4-year university counterparts due to differences in psychosocial factors and decreased availability…

Objective: Superiority experiments supply a critical lens to probe higher education interventions because they can dismantle the collective effect of a program and identify the relative contribution of the core components. However, such lines of inquiry are generally absent in higher education literature. We draw on experimental data to probe the…

Objective/Research Question: Community college "Promise" programs have proliferated recently, particularly in areas with many low-income, academically struggling students. Many Promise programs restrict eligibility by high school performance but set eligibility thresholds quite low. As such they function as "low-bar" merit…

Objective: This study examined the effects of offering proactive student-success coaching, informed by predictive analytics, on student academic performance and persistence. Specifically, this study investigated semester grade point average (GPA) and semester-to-semester persistence of community college students as outcomes. Methods: This study…

Objective: Standardized placement tests remain the primary means by which new community college students are assessed and placed in the hierarchy of math and English coursework. A growing body of evidence indicates that placement tests tend to underestimate students' likelihood of achieving passing grades in college-level courses, leading to…

Objective: Extensive reform has been implemented in community colleges across the nation to help expedite the attainment of students' academic goals of degree completion and transfer to 4-year institutions. Reform at the institution in this study resulted in replacement of the college writing placement exam and the precollegiate course sequence…

Objective: This study examines the role of community colleges in closing the gender gap in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) by studying whether beginning at a community college improves the likelihood of female students earning their bachelor's degree in STEM. Method: Using nationally representative data, we apply a…

Objective: Although much research on community colleges focuses on institutional challenges or student deficits, emerging evidence suggests that student-instructor relationships have the potential to impact student success. The current study examined factors that could influence community college students' development of relationships with…

Objective: This study examined how a set of theoretically derived factors predicted the educational attainment outcomes of Latina/o community college students. The guiding research question was, "What precollege and background characteristics, college experiences, and environmental pull factors uniquely predict persistence, certificate or…

Objective: Increasing rural community college degree attainment is very important to foster rural areas' economic and social well-being. Rural community colleges differ greatly from their suburban and urban counterparts in financial aid patterns and student bodies. However, existing literature is vacant with respect to student financial aid and…

Objective: This study explored how high school and postsecondary academic parameters may relate to the choice of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) major for students beginning their postsecondary education at community colleges. Our study incorporated these two clusters of factors into a statistical model to examine STEM…

Objective: This study explores the relationship between online social network involvement and academic outcomes among community college students. Prior theory hypothesizes that socio-academic moments are especially important for the integration of students into community colleges and that integration is related to academic outcomes. Online social…

Objective: In recent years, developmental education (DE) reform has led to a restructuring of the placement process, redesigning of course instructional modalities, or implementing student support services to supplement developmental coursework. In Florida, recent legislative changes allowed students to opt out of placement testing and enroll…

Objective: This study explored the relationship between different types of interpersonal interaction, characterized by their underlying motivations, and educational outcomes among students in manufacturing programs at two-year colleges. While there exist several ways to classify interaction, motivation as an inherent attribute that fuels behaviors…

Objective: This study examined to what extent differences exist in pre-college characteristics and academic performance between Black male student-athletes and their student-athlete peers. Method: Data provided by the Florida Department of Education's PK-20 Education Data Warehouse (EDW) were analyzed as a function of group membership (gender and…