Community College Management Practices That Promote Student Success

There has been surprisingly little rigorous research on institutional effectiveness in community colleges. Even the much larger body of research on institutional effectiveness among baccalaureate-granting institutions in general tells us more about the student characteristics and institutional features (e.g., selectivity, size, resources) associated with positive student outcomes than about the policies and practices affecting student success that are under a college’s control. A key problem in this research is how to compare the performance of different institutions serving student bodies with different characteristics. Several recent studies have sought to examine the policies and practices of undergraduate institutions that perform better than would be expected given their students’ characteristics (Muraskin & Lee, 2004; Carey, 2005; Kuh et al., 2005). While these studies offer insight into institutional effectiveness in baccalaureate-granting institutions, the applicability of their findings to community colleges is questionable. They also suffer from a number of data and methodological limitations. This Brief summarizes a study by the Community College Research Center of community college management practices that promote student success. This study addresses the limitations of previous research on the effectiveness of undergraduate institutions in several ways. It takes advantage of a rich set of longitudinal student unit record data to control for the individual characteristics of the students that the colleges serve. Because the study is based on the outcomes of both full-time and part-time students, our measure of institutional effectiveness is better suited to community colleges and their students than is the National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES) “student-right-to-know” measure commonly used by other studies. We also measured student persistence in addition to completion and transfer, which is appropriate given that community college students often take a long time to complete their programs or to transfer. Our sample is confined to all community colleges in a single state, thus eliminating the effects on institutional performance of variations in public policy and institutional mission, practice, and resources across states. While some previous studies examined only institutions considered to be high performers, we directly compared colleges found to have a relatively high impact on the educational success of their students with colleges that have a low impact. Moreover, this study, unlike others, seeks to account for changes in colleges’ policies and practices over time.