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IS STUDENT-RIGHT-TO-KNOW ALL YOU SHOULD KNOW? An Analysis of Community College Graduation Rates

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Abstract

Over the last decade, policymakers, educators, and researchers have increasingly sought to understand community college policies and practices that promote students’ success. This effort has been partly driven by an increased emphasis on outcome accountability, but it has also promoted a productive discussion about improving institutional performance. The research reported here has two related goals. One goal is to work towards strengthening the ability to assess and compare institutional performance. We thus have developed a model that can be used to adjust simple graduation rates for institutional characteristics, such as student composition, college resources, size, and location, all of which might influence those rates. Our long-term goal is to understand how to improve student outcomes, so the paper also uses the model to measure the effect of those institutional characteristics on graduation rates. We use data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) surveys, applying a weighted least-squares procedure for grouped data to estimate an institutional-completion rates model. This analysis confirms several hypotheses about institutional determinants of graduation rates at community colleges. Our results indicate a consistent negative relationship between enrollment size and completion. Additionally, colleges with high shares of minority students, part-time students, and women have lower graduation rates. A final significant finding among institutional characteristics is that greater instructional expenditures are related to a greater likelihood of graduation. The method developed here can be used to better assess the performance of community colleges.

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Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the Ford Foundation. The work reported here has also benefited from research funded by Lumina Foundation for Education (as part of the Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count initiative) and the U.S. Department of Education (as part of the National Assessment of Vocational Education). Helpful comments from three anonymous reviewers are gratefully acknowledged. We also wish to thank Mariana Alfonso, Joanne Bashford, Mort Inger, Lauren O’Gara, Lisa Rothman, and Wendy Schwartz, for help and advice. All errors are solely ours.

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Correspondence to Juan Carlos Calcagno.

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Bailey, T., Calcagno, J., Jenkins, D. et al. IS STUDENT-RIGHT-TO-KNOW ALL YOU SHOULD KNOW? An Analysis of Community College Graduation Rates. Res High Educ 47, 491–519 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-005-9005-0

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