Great Expectations is a Virginia Community College System program for youth who were in foster care after the age of 13. Foster youth enter college with multiple disadvantages, including being less academically prepared compared to their peers and often lacking social support for their education. A program evaluation was conducted at a specific…

Federal second chance Pell grants were recently made widely available to incarcerated students in the United States to fund undergraduate education. Piedmont Virginia Community College was a pilot site for this expansion and began full scale implementation of transfer-oriented associate degrees at three correctional centers in its service area.…

More than half of states have implemented tuition-free college policies aimed at reducing attendance costs and incentivizing enrollment. We review the academic literature on the design features and impacts of these tuition-free policies, and we analyze an initiative Virginia implemented in 2021 called Get a Skill, Get a Job, Get Ahead (G3), which…

States are coordinating with two-year institutions on workforce programming for unemployed or underemployed residents. Reskilling residents is especially vital for states that endured historic unemployment rates as a result of COVID-19-related layoffs. Nationally, the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES) is making…

To counter tuition and textbook costs for degree-seeking students, a specific pathway to a bachelor's degree in Leadership was developed. The pathway, comprised of partnerships with the high school Leadership Academy at a public high school, community college, and Old Dominion University (ODU), reduced tuition and textbook costs, allowing the…

The successes of corequisite remediation courses and supplemental instruction over traditional remediation courses such as the modular Math Essentials have been widely and recently documented (Logue, Watanabe-Rose, & Douglas, 2016). Corequisite reform is an important strategy to improve student completion of higher education goals. A robust…

For several years now, the Old Dominion University community college leadership research team has been examining academic affairs and student affairs outcomes on community college student success. College student professionals on two-year campuses most typically provide a wide variety of supports and interventions across campus, in settings that…

Despite evidence suggesting that standardized tests are an imperfect measure of academic readiness, many community colleges across the country rely on them alone to determine student course placement. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced campuses to transition to remote operations in spring 2020, proctoring in-person placement tests became…

The Virginia Community College System (VCCS) embarked on a comprehensive mathematics pathways project in October 2015 with a move from design to implementation in spring 2017. The VCCS Mathematics Pathways Project (VMPP) aimed not only to develop strategies to improve retention and completion, but also to address foundational barriers to students'…

The purpose of this implementation report is to help community college leaders, foundations, and public education policymakers understand the impact that nudges have on student success, especially for students from populations that typically have low rates of college completion. The promising results of the NTSS [Nudging to STEM Success]…

As community colleges across the country look for ways to promote student success, the need for scaling effective approaches is critical. This guide builds on a framework of four phases of scaling developed in Job For the Future's (JFF's) previous publication, "Thinking Big: A Framework for States on Scaling Up Community College…

A full-scale oral communication assessment was conducted by the Virginia Community College System (VCCS) during the academic year 2013-14. Key components of this assessment included faculty involvement at all stages of assessment and collaboration with assessment coordinators and lead staff personnel. The VCCS Office of Institutional Research and…

This is the final external evaluation report prepared by SRI International for the Rural Math Excel Partnership (RMEP) project, an investing in innovation (i3) development project funded by the U.S. Department of Education. Operated by Virginia Advanced Study Strategies, Inc. (VASS), the RMEP project included six rural school districts (LEAs) in…

National initiatives to raise K-12 standards and align them to postsecondary entrance requirements have prompted states and/or state postsecondary systems to enact policies to improve alignment among postsecondary readiness standards, postsecondary placement and diagnostic exams, and developmental education curricula. This report examines how six…

The study reported here involved Cooperative Extension as a key research partner and was guided by a community-based participatory research approach and a feasibility study framework. The research objective was to assess four indicators of feasibility (i.e., acceptability, demand, implementation, and limited-effectiveness) of a gardening and…