Abstract
America’s community colleges play a major role in increasing access to higher education and, as open access institutions, they are key points of entry to postsecondary education for historically underrepresented populations. However, their students often fall short of completing degrees. Policymakers, scholars, and philanthropists are dedicating unprecedented attention and resources to identifying strategies to improve retention, academic performance, and degree completion among community college students. This chapter reviews experimental evidence on their effectiveness, finding that they often meet with limited success because they typically target just one or two aspects of students’ lives, are of short duration, and fail to improve the institutional context. They also rarely address a serious structural constraint: limited resources. We discuss new directions for future interventions, research and evaluation.
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Notes
- 1.
Applicants to the Buffett Scholarship needed to specify a “target” college in their initial application, but students were not bound to attend these colleges.
- 2.
Opening Doors was a multi-site experimental demonstration examining the impact of different sorts of interventions designed to improve college retention and completion among lower-income students. These various interventions included learning communities, college skills courses, intensive counseling, and performance-based scholarships.
- 3.
This name is something of a misnomer. Most scholarships and grants, need-based or otherwise, have performance and enrollment requirements for continued receipt. Indeed, the specific performance requirements of the PBSs were substantially more lenient than those of the WSG or Buffet scholarship. What distinguishes the PBSs is the incremental disbursal of grants and the tying of these disbursals to the performance of specific behaviors, such as attending tutoring sessions.
- 4.
We are summarizing results for the first two study cohorts (out of four) only, because four semesters of data are available for these cohorts. Program-semester effects for cohorts 3 and 4 are similar, though of smaller magnitude.
- 5.
A performance-based scholarship RCT was carried out at the University of New Mexico, and another targeted low-income high school seniors in California (Cash for College), but these results fall outside the purvey of this review.
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Monaghan, D., Kolbe, T., Goldrick-Rab, S. (2018). Experimental Evidence on Interventions to Improve Educational Attainment at Community Colleges. In: Schneider, B. (eds) Handbook of the Sociology of Education in the 21st Century. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76694-2_24
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