College completion rates are low--nearly 40 percent of students do not earn a degree within six years of enrolling in college. Community college students face the highest hurdles--about 60 percent are without a degree six years after matriculating. Research has identified strategies that institutions can use to improve student success and degree…

The Pullias Center for Higher Education, as part of the USC-LACCD Research-Practice Partnership (RPP), is conducting a mixed-methods evaluation of Assembly Bill 705 (AB705) focused on how community college practitioners are implementing this landmark policy, which directs all 116 community colleges in the California Community College (CCC) system…

For 8 years Washington State has operated a performance funding policy, the Student Achievement Initiative (SAI). The policy allocates appropriations to the state's 34 community and technical colleges based on points earned through student achievement of college-readiness, retention, and completion milestones. Grounded in a conceptual framework of…

Over the next three years, the California State Board of Education (SBE) and the California Department of Education (CDE) will refine the college and career readiness (CCR) measures in the state's school accountability system. Determining which measures to use, given that they need to be robust, useful, equitable, and cost effective--and…

Understanding how educational practitioners make sense of and subsequently implement policy has been an increasingly important objective of the K-12 research community. This study extends this research into higher education via an in-depth case study of an urban public 2-year technical college. Drawing on sensemaking theory and critical policy…

Community colleges are an increasingly important component of the higher education systems in the United States. Community college as a pathway toward a better educated workforce has been emphasized at a national and state level. Virginia's policy makers set an ambitious goal of producing 100,000 new baccalaureate degrees in the Commonwealth by…

There is wide agreement that the well-paying jobs of the future will require postsecondary credentials. But for many students attending community college, developmental (or remedial) classes in reading, composition, and/or mathematics--the courses that students often must complete before they can enroll in courses that confer credit toward a…

The most recent data available from the National Center for Educational Statistics (2004) estimate that 60% of community college freshmen and 25% of freshmen at 4-year public institutions nationwide complete at least one remedial course. Nationally, fewer than 40% of students who are referred to developmental education actually enroll in…

The Learning Communities Demonstration is a national research project that is testing the effectiveness of learning communities in six community colleges across the United States: Merced College in California; The Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) in Baltimore, Maryland; Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, Florida; Houston…