Improving graduation rates is one of the biggest missions in many universities across the country and it is surely the case on the campus of this institution. The work here presents a statistical tool box to use early academic performance as a predictor for graduation with logistic regression and machine learning techniques. The methods described…

Predicting student's successful completion of academic programs and the features that influence their performance can have a significant effect on improving students' completion, and graduation rates and reduce attrition rates. Therefore, identifying students are at risk, and the courses where improvements in content, delivery mode, pedagogy, and…

No course exists in isolation, so examining student progression through courses within a broader program context is an important step in integrating course-level and program-level analytics. Integration in this manner allows us to see the impact of course-level changes to the program, as well as identify points in the program structure where…

The Learn Everywhere Act provides greater flexibility for students to earn credits towards high school graduation requirements through approved learning experiences outside of the classroom. This document contains model policy for the establishment of a Learn Everywhere Act.

We provide evidence about college financial aid from an eight-year randomized trial where high school ninth graders received a $12,000 merit-based grant offer. The program was designed to be free of tuition/fees at community colleges and substantially lower the cost of four-year colleges. During high school, it increased students' college…

Determining which students are at risk of poorer outcomes -- such as dropping out, failing classes, or decreasing standardized examination scores -- has become an important area of research and practice in both K-12 and higher education. The detectors produced from this type of predictive modeling research are increasingly used in early warning…

Colleges have increasingly turned to predictive analytics to target at-risk students for additional support. Most of the predictive analytic applications in higher education are proprietary, with private companies offering little transparency about their underlying models. We address this lack of transparency by systematically comparing two…

Despite the overwhelming evidence that higher education data are nested at various levels, single-level techniques such as regression and analysis of variance are commonly used to investigate student outcomes. This is problematic as a mismatch in methodology and research questions can lead to biased parameter estimates. The purpose of this study…

Higher education in America is characterized by widespread access to college but low rates of completion, especially among undergraduates at less selective institutions. We analyze longitudinal transcript data to examine processes leading to graduation, using Hidden Markov modeling. We identify several latent states that are associated with…

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…

An Income-Share Agreement (ISA) is an education financing tool through which a student promises a certain percentage of future income (the "income share") for upfront funding for education. Recently, ISAs have been subject to significant national attention and scrutiny from policymakers, investors, consumer advocates, and postsecondary…

Unfortunately, within the extant scholarship that has explored queer and trans* historically Black college and university (HBCU) students, the discourse(s) that deliberately center how they can be retained, persist, and ultimately graduate have largely been absent from the literature. Thus, this conceptual exploration offers strategies that HBCUs…

Program administrators of academic mentoring programs for African American male community college students contend that mentoring provides a means to increase retention and improve completion rates. Through the evaluation of prior studies, this study will seek to identify the factors that lead to successful completion. Shandley's (1989) concept of…

Prior research studies associated the employment of part-time faculty with student degree and/or certificate completion (Benjamin, 2002; Ehrenberg & Zhang, 2005; Jacoby, 2006; Leslie & Gappa, 2002; Umbach, 2008; Umbach & Wawrzynski, 2005). To date, institutional-level data have been utilized to investigate whether such employment…

Rates of student success--four-year transfer, degree, and certificate completion--are frequently discussed. Less frequent, however, are opportunities to reflect on how these outcomes are measured. In this paper, I reflect on how rates of success--specifically for men of color--are calculated based on two California institutional accountability…