With Federal Funding on the Way, Here’s How State and Local Leaders Can Improve Outcomes for Community College Students
By Ross Tilchin
As the United States emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, state and local leaders have an unprecedented opportunity to help their residents gain new skills, pursue higher education, and ultimately obtain higher-quality employment.
For many lower-income Americans in particular, community colleges have long provided a strong path to better-paying, more stable jobs — a key component of upward mobility. A recent analysis found that women and men who complete an associate’s degree earn $7,160 and $4,460 more per year, respectively, than individuals without a post-secondary degree.
Unfortunately, too many students face barriers to completing community college. Across the country, only 26 percent of community college students earn an associate’s or bachelor’s degree within six years.
Fortunately, in recent years, evidence has emerged around a range of practices that improve persistence and completion outcomes for community college students. As part of Results for America’s Economic Mobility Catalog project, we recently profiled two programs proven to generate positive outcomes: the City University of New York’s Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (CUNY ASAP) and the Detroit Promise Path.
CUNY ASAP represents a significant transformation of the community college experience for students, featuring comprehensive financial supports, full-time enrollment, block scheduling, intensive advising, and cohort-based learning. The results it has generated are unprecedented — ASAP students graduate from community college within three years at more than double the rate of non-participants. The Detroit Promise Path is a smaller scale intervention that offers student advising and financial supports. Participants stay enrolled more consistently and accumulate more credits than non-participants.
What has prevented community colleges around the country from investing in programs like CUNY ASAP and the Detroit Promise Path? Often, colleges simply lack the resources to invest in these sorts of initiatives. But the funding landscape for community colleges is changing rapidly. The recently-passed American Rescue Plan (ARP) sets aside $10 billion for community colleges, and the Biden Administration’s proposed American Families Plan (AFP) would provide $62 billion for evidence-based approaches that improve completion rates at colleges and universities serving large numbers of low-income students (like CUNY ASAP and the Detroit Promise Path).
With significant funding from the ARP on the way and the potentially transformative investment from the AFP on the horizon, New York City and Detroit’s experiences in implementing CUNY ASAP and the Detroit Promise Path offer several timely lessons to state and local leaders.
Fortunately, in recent years, evidence has emerged around a range of practices that improve persistence and completion outcomes for community college students.
Lesson 1: Provide community college students with financial, academic, and personal support
At the core of both CUNY ASAP and the Detroit Promise Path is the recognition that community college students demonstrate better outcomes when they receive significant financial, academic, and personal support from their schools.
As most community college students come from low-income families, reducing or eliminating the cost of community college is a critical first step. Both CUNY ASAP and the Detroit Promise Path offer “last dollar” scholarships that build on federal student aid to ensure students attend school tuition free. CUNY ASAP students are provided with free subway passes and vouchers to cover the cost of textbooks, and Detroit Promise Path students are provided with $50 per month to cover various costs.
While these financial supports are necessary, they are insufficient in boosting graduation outcomes. As evidenced by both programs’ success, positive persistence and graduation outcomes emerge when this financial assistance is paired with academic, social, and personal supports.
CUNY ASAP and the Detroit Promise Path provide these non-financial supports to students largely through academic advisors or coaches. Every student is paired with a dedicated staff member who helps them navigate class enrollment, academic coursework, and any personal issues that may affect their performance at school. Advisors meet with students regularly and manage small caseloads of students (100–150 per advisor), allowing them to develop meaningful bonds with students, understand the challenges they face in their personal lives, and help troubleshoot when obstacles arise.
Lesson 2: Collect and review student data to enable greater reform
For both CUNY ASAP and the Detroit Promise Path, continuous data collection on student performance has helped drive better outcomes, attract funding, and scale services. As advisors meet with students, they track a range of metrics, like academic performance, class attendance, and engagement with staff. This allows administrators to make strategic decisions from data drawn from thousands of students.
CUNY ASAP and the Detroit Promise Path also partnered with MDRC to evaluate the longer-term outcomes generated by both programs. For CUNY ASAP, positive evaluation results from an initial pilot helped persuade Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration to more than triple the size of the program (from about 1,300 to 4,300 students). A second positive evaluation contributed to Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration decision to more than quintuple the number of students being served (from 4,300 to 25,000 students).
In the case of the Detroit Promise Path, promising preliminary results published in 2018 helped lead to more than $4.5 million in new philanthropic contributions, allowing the program to serve all Detroit Promise students at participating community colleges. A 2021 evaluation demonstrated the need to provide even more support to students, sparking conversations of further reform among city and regional leaders.
Lesson 3: Create systems of community college accountability
One major difference between CUNY ASAP and the Detroit Promise Path is that ASAP was created and is administered by a team in the CUNY Chancellor’s Office. Staff members at every school within the CUNY system execute the ASAP model with oversight and assistance from the central ASAP office, creating a system-wide environment of transparency, accountability, and support.
In the Detroit region, community colleges operate independently, with no centralized authority enacting policy or overseeing operations. As such, the Detroit Promise Path is delivered by a third party, the Detroit Regional Chamber. While the program has been able to successfully integrate student coaches into five of the six community colleges in the region, the fact that the Detroit Promise Path is delivered by an outside organization hinders the possibility of transforming the student experience beyond the support that coaches provide.
Lesson 4: Help students graduate in less time
For many community college students, going a few years without income is not an option. Students have to balance school with work, family obligations, and other responsibilities. In traditional community colleges, this has meant that students are forced to enroll in courses part-time, taking classes that occur during openings in their (often turbulent, unpredictable) schedules, and with class schedules shifting every term.
Unfortunately, students who enroll in community college part time are significantly less likely to graduate within six years than full time students.
Recognizing the tension between students’ need to work and the likelihood of negative outcomes for part-time students, CUNY ASAP operates with block schedules, so students have a condensed courseload that requires them to be on campus for as little time as possible.
Because the Detroit Promise Path is administered by a third party, it cannot mandate full-time enrollment among its participants, nor can it adjust course scheduling. The vast majority of Detroit Promise Path students attend community college part-time, which makes it extremely difficult to graduate within three years.
Lesson 5: Ensure students can get to school
Students will struggle to graduate from community college if they cannot reliably get to class. As many low-income students do not have access to a car, insufficient access to public transportation can be a major barrier to post-secondary success.
Recognizing the importance of transportation — and the cost burden that it presents — CUNY ASAP provides free, unlimited subway passes to its students. With transportation costs eliminated and an excellent public transit system to rely on, ASAP students seldom face major transportation barriers in getting to school.
While the Detroit Promise Path provides $50 per month to students, this stipend cannot cover the cost of both books and public transportation. And unfortunately, public transportation is severely lacking across the Detroit region, with attempts at creating a unified system having been repeatedly rejected. With insufficient financial support and inadequate transit coverage, a tremendous number of Promise Path students struggle to get to school. In a survey of students who had left community college, 52% said that finding reliable transportation was a key factor in their decision.
Community colleges can play a central role in improving opportunity for low-income students across the country. With the experiences of CUNY ASAP and the Detroit Promise Path as a guide, state and local leaders should ensure that community colleges provide a full spectrum of financial, academic, and personal supports to students; collect detailed data on student progress and performance; create systems of accountability and insist that community colleges “own” new programs; change processes to help students complete their degrees faster; and collaborate with regional transit providers to reduce transportation barriers. With federal funding on the way, the time to enact reform is now.
For more about CUNY ASAP and Detroit Promise Path, read the Results for America case studies CUNY ASAP — Bronx, NY and Detroit Promise Path: Detroit, MI, and view the What Works Media Project short films — “CUNY ASAP: Accelerating the Journey to Graduation” and “Detroit Promise Path.”
Ross Tilchin is Associate Director of Economic Mobility at Results for America.
