Math is an integral subject in nearly all STEM disciplines, and early exposure to advanced math coursework may encourage high school students to enter and persist in STEM fields in college. This report examines whether taking college algebra through dual enrollment affects high school graduation, college enrollment, and early STEM outcomes. I use…

Every year, BC Student Outcomes collects feedback from former students who took post-secondary programs. Student feedback is essential to maintain quality and relevance in the education system. In 2021, just over 29,500 former students were surveyed; key results from those surveys are presented here. In 2021, 92 percent of the former…

Every year, the BC Student Outcomes Program collects feedback from former students who took post-secondary programs at a participating B.C. post-secondary institution. Student feedback is essential to maintain quality and relevance in the education system. The former Diploma, Associate Degree, and Certificate students are surveyed within two years…

Diversifying the STEM workforce is a national priority, yet white males continue to dominate the ranks of professional scientists and engineers in the United States. This is partly due to disparities in academic success for women and minoritized students in prerequisite introductory STEM courses, leading to higher attrition from B.S. degree…

This paper presents new estimates of the effects of the City University of New York's (CUNY's) Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) model, evaluated using a randomized controlled trial first in New York and later through a replication in Ohio. It presents longer-term effects of CUNY ASAP in New York, showing that the program's effect on…

The discrepancy in the empirical literature surrounding distance education (DE) coursetaking among community college students has led to the online paradox, where short-term or more proximal academic outcomes associated with DE coursetaking are negative, but the long-term or distal academic outcomes are positive. Importantly, no previous study has…

The enrollment of military/veteran students at U.S. colleges and universities is growing steadily; however, factors affecting their academic success need further investigation. Guided by Tinto's student integration model and Bean and Metzner's model of nontraditional student attrition, the relationships between student characteristics and academic…

We describe the postsecondary transitions of students taking CTE courses in high school using administrative data on one cohort of high school graduates in Washington State. Conditional on observable characteristics, CTE concentrators--high school graduates who complete at least four CTE credits--are about 4 percentage points less likely to enroll…

Understanding patterns of educational attainment among rural youth is a critical concern for our nation as we seek to make postsecondary access and attainment more equitable across our increasingly diverse student population. The current study examines data collected in the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 to identify contemporary patterns of…

Scholarship on minority-serving institutions (MSIs) has established the critical role they play in spite of significant financial constraints. At the same time, descriptive statistical analyses have also found that MSIs, as a group, have lower completion rates than the national average. More research is thus needed on the factors underlying the…

Recently, studies have adopted fixed effects modeling to identify the returns to college. This method has the advantage over ordinary least squares estimates in that unobservable, individual-level characteristics that may bias the estimated returns are differenced out. But the method requires extensive longitudinal data and involves complex…

Over the past few years, a multitude of studies have examined the labor market returns to community college credentials, taking advantage of new administrative datasets that link college transcripts to quarterly earnings records and allow for comparisons of students' earnings before and after enrollment. These studies, however, typically follow…

The retention of nursing students remains a challenge in higher education, and the need for nurses in the United States is projected to increase. The purpose of this study was to investigate nursing student persistence in an associate degree program by examining differences in the presence of key social, environmental, and academic factors across…

Despite having been the largest source of financial aid to low-income college students in the United States, the traditional Pell Grant had one major limitation: If students enrolled in two semesters full-time, they would not have had any tuition support for the summer term of the same academic year. The year-round Pell (YRP) was implemented in…

This set of Web Tables is the fourth in a series of four that together provide key information about 2011-12 first-time postsecondary students' characteristics and their 6-year retention, persistence, attainment, withdrawal, stopout, and transfer rates. The series draws on data collected for the 2012/17 Beginning Postsecondary Students…