Close to two million first-year undergraduates enroll in developmental education each year. According to recent national estimates, less than half of students who start in developmental education go on to complete gateway courses and less than one-third eventually earn a degree. However, more research is needed to better assess potential…

Background: Developmental education (i.e., remedial education) has come under scrutiny given evidence that it is ineffective for learning or hinders students' progress toward degree completion (Scott-Clayton & Rodriguez, 2014; Xu & Dadgar, 2018). However, there is heterogeneity in the effect of developmental education, with positive…

In this article, I utilize a regression discontinuity design to estimate the effects of Tulsa Achieves--a prevalent and understudied type of tuition-free college program. In contrast to concerns regarding tuition-free community college suppressing bachelor's degree attainment, I find that Tulsa Achieves increased the likelihood of transferring to…

Objective: The study assesses the impact of dual enrollment participation on remediation and completion for traditional first time, full-time freshmen at a community college in Northeast Tennessee. Method: This study began with the full population of 1,232 students who enrolled between 2008 and 2012 at a community college in northeast Tennessee…

In line with the national trend, Mississippi faces the same challenge that fewer students are completing college degrees. In response to the national call for more degrees, many states have implemented dual enrollment programs to try to decrease the transition anxiety between high school and college, which could possibly lead to more college…

Statway® is one of the Community College Pathways initiatives developed by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to promote students' progress beginning in developmental math to and through college math credit. Early descriptive results suggested that the Statway program has tripled the success rate for students in half the time…

College graduation rates in the United States are low in both real and relative terms. This has left all stakeholders looking for novel solutions while perhaps ignoring extant but underused programs. This article examines the effect of "summer bridge" programs, which have students enroll in coursework prior to beginning their first full…

The study reviewed in this paper used data from the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS:88) to examine the effects of dual enrollment programs for high school students on college degree attainment. The study further reported on whether the impacts of dual enrollment were different for first generation college students. Dual enrollment…

This article contributes to the empirical literature on remediation in community colleges by using policy variation across North Carolina's community colleges to examine how remediation affects various outcomes for traditional-age college students. We find that being required to take a remedial course (as we define it in this article) either in…

There is a growing view that students who enroll in developmental courses are less successful in completing their programs than non-developmental students. Nevertheless, even though developmental students as a group ultimately might not be as academically successful as non-developmental students, many of them might still derive benefit from taking…

Traditionally, modeling student retention has been done by deriving student success predictors and measuring the likelihood of success based on several background factors such as age, race, gender, and other pre-college variables, also known as the input-output model. Increasingly, however, researchers have used mediating factors of the student…

This paper uses the credits-attempted perspective--in the context of how many credits a student attempts in their first year of college--and reports on several related projects all intended to evaluate potential interventions to raise academic momentum among first-year community college students. The presentation contrasts non-experimental…

The summer school sessions that colleges offer their undergraduates are sometimes considered supplementary activities and are rarely perceived as central to a college's mission or effectiveness. However, analyses of college transcript data that tracked a nationally-representative sample of undergraduates for several years and through multiple…

The Maui Hawaii Educational consortium (the Maui School District and Maui Community College) sought scientifically based evidence for the effectiveness of the "Cognitive Tutor (CT) Algebra I Curriculum" to inform adoption decisions. Decision makers were particularly interested in whether the use of the "CT" program affects…