Enrolling a third of undergraduate students nationally and the majority of students with family incomes below $32,000, community colleges hold the promise of supplying the nation with the needed skilled workforce and economic mobility for the next generation. They offer credentials in different fields of study and of varying lengths: some short-term certificates require a semester or two to complete, while Associate Degrees generally require two years to complete and long term certificates take between a year and two years.  In the last few years, the availability of administrative data has allowed researchers a more nuanced understanding of community college credentials in several states.

Community Colleges across the nation have taken the lead in offering online courses to hundreds of thousands of students.  Online courses offer students freedom and flexibility to take courses at their own leisure.  Faculty are better able to track their students’ progress, and community colleges can offer more courses to more students without having to pay for added classroom infrastructure.  Administrators may see this as a way to offer affordable courses to working students, students in remote areas, and students with families.  Previous research has indicated that students who learn content online are just as likely to retain knowledge as students who have taken courses face to face.  Thus, with the advent of online learning has also brought into question by what measures do we define success and what are the best modalities of instruction for students.

Given that community colleges are open-access institutions that serve a diversity of students with a range of skills, they need some means of identifying students’ readiness for college-level work. This typically happens via placement testing during college matriculation. Subsequently, we estimate that about 80 percent of all incoming California community college students are placed in developmental/remedial courses during the assessment and placement process (based on our calculations from the CCCCO Data Mart and data from a large urban community college district).

In the face of shrinking government budgets and a growing need to train a high-skilled labor force, policymakers have become increasingly interested in cost-effective measures that induce more students to pursue post-secondary education. A great deal of research has been done to understand the barriers of college entry, especially for low-income students.

The United States has been struggling with the phenomenon of high school dropout, and public alternative schools are one of the strategies to solve the issue, specifically for at-risk high school students. Such schools play an important role in educating students who are expelled or suspended from regular schools due to their at-risk behaviors and placed in such schools to continue their learning. However, each alternative high school has its own school structure and process, which could be important factors for the effects on at-risk students.

High school graduation rates in California recently topped 80 percent – the highest they’ve ever been. It’s an accomplishment that has earned California educators some well-deserved praise. Unfortunately, in California and across the U.S., high school graduation is not yet a reliable indicator of postsecondary readiness. For example, 68 percent of students who successfully graduate high school and enter the California State University system still require remediation before they’re ready for entry-level, credit-bearing college coursework.

Many students choose not to attend college continuously from matriculation to graduation. Reasons for breaks in collegiate tenure abound. One such reason is to participate in a professional internship program, either one found and offered to the student by their academic institution or one the student has discovered and applied to on their own. These programs are methods of on-the-job training which often take place in white collar or professional settings where students work in a field that they are considering as a career. Prior research on such programs has focused on labor market effects, generally finding positive outcomes such as an increased employment probability, higher wages, and a shortened unemployment period immediately following graduation.

The issue of high school dropout is a serious concern for educators, policy makers, and the public.  The economic and social consequences for those who do not complete high school have continued to climb as the demands for a more educated workforce have increased.  Young adults who do not complete high school are more likely to be unemployed, welfare recipients, and when employed, make less money on average than their peers who did complete high school.  High school dropouts are also more likely to suffer from depression or other mental health issues, join gangs or be involved in other criminal activities, and serve time in jail.  These outcomes are a serious concern at the individual level and carry a large “social cost”.

College graduation rates in the United States are low both in real and relative terms. This has left policymakers and leaders of these institutions looking for novel solutions, while perhaps ignoring extant but underused programs. Our research examines the effect on degree completion of “summer bridge” programs, which have students enroll in coursework prior to beginning their first full academic year.

While there is widespread concern nationwide about low rates of college readiness among our high school graduates—approximately 50 percent of all entering college students take at least one remedial class—little attention is paid to how “college readiness” is actually determined.  Remediating students is expensive: colleges spend $7 billion annually on developmental education, and this estimate does not include opportunity costs for students. Yet at community colleges, where almost half of all students begin college, readiness is almost always determined by scores on relatively short standardized math and English placement tests. Often, these scores alone determine whether students can enroll in college-level courses, or must first go through remediation.

Accelerated learning options such as Advanced Placement (AP) courses are represented as exemplars of challenging curricula that prepare students for collegiate coursework.  Although gaps exist in the participation rates of ethnic minority students in accelerated learning options, few researchers have compared the performance of underrepresented student groups in these programs from one state to another. 

Does segregation still matter for educational inequality? Nearly fifty years after the civil rights movement, American neighborhoods and schools remain highly segregated by race and income.  A longstanding concern is that segregation has negative effects on the education of racial minorities and low-income students by concentrating them in the worst schools and neighborhoods.   Correspondingly, a concern of many white or affluent parents when considering residence in racially or economically diverse neighborhood environment is that their child’s education might not be as good as in a more homogenous, advantaged environment.

In 1981, the National Commission on Excellence in Education (NCEE) examined the relationship between college admission requirements and student achievement in high school, reporting serious concerns with the preparation of high school graduates for college. Within a year twenty-six states had raised graduation requirements in response to the NCEE report. Mathematics and science were areas of particular concern and by 1989 forty-two states increased high school course graduation requirements (CGRs) in mathematics, science, or both.

When school districts’ financial resources are strained and they are cornered into dismissing staff, school counselors are among the first personnel to lose their jobs. Recent budget cuts have led to mass layoffs of counselors across many districts and states, particularly in California where, according to the U.S. Department of Education, the student-to-counselor ratio is now the highest in the country; more than 1,000 students per school counselor.

Over the past 15 years, several federal and California state laws have been enacted to support older adolescents in foster care with completing a high school credential and gaining access to higher education.  Promoting educational attainment is particularly important for these young people.  Since they often do not have the same level of family support and resources to rely on as they enter adulthood, completing a high school or college degree could be a deciding factor in finding stable employment and establishing self-sufficiency. 

College graduation rates in the United States lag far behind college attendance rates and this gap is growing, particularly at broad-access four-year and two-year schools.  There are a number of theories as to why students do not complete college: schools fail to provide key information about how to be successful or students fail to act on the information that they have; students are not adequately academically prepared; students lack important non-academic skills such as time management and study skills and schools do not provide enough structured support in these areas; students do not feel integrated into the school community; students struggle in balancing school with career and personal demands.  With such a long and varied list of potentially serious obstacles and an increasingly tight fiscal environment, we’re faced with a difficult policy question: what cost-effective levers can colleges employ for boosting graduation rates?

There is substantial interest in increasing high school graduations rates, yet youth from low-income families and communities experience greater academic challenges and the achievement gap between children from low- and high- income families has been growing.  Students who live in poverty are significantly more likely to have lower grades, standardized test scores, and high school completion rates than their more affluent peers.  It has been suggested that out-of-school programs can contribute to better educational outcomes but few evaluations at the high school level have been completed. 

With high school graduation only months away, seniors in California may already be eagerly anticipating the relaxation of summer before they transition into college or the workforce. For students who have planned and worked hard to pursue postsecondary education immediately after high school, however, a series of unanticipated financial and procedural hurdles may loom on the horizon that have the potential to derail their college aspirations.  

In recent years, postsecondary co-enrollment has become a noteworthy attendance pattern among many college students. Co-enrollment at the postsecondary level refers to simultaneous enrollment in two or more colleges during the same academic term. Many colleges and universities now offer such co-enrollment programs and options. In California, for example, if students decide to attend any of the state’s community or four-year colleges, they can enroll simultaneously at any UC or CSU campus without going through a typical admissions process. This means that undergraduate students at UC-Riverside may enroll at another UC institution during the same academic session as long as they meet UCR's college enrollment and academic performance requirements.

With the passing last year of California’s Proposition 30, the California Community College (CCC) system received a small reprieve from years of grueling budget cuts exacerbated by soaring student demand. Consequently, the number of course sections being offered is on the rise, and the number of waitlisted students per college has dropped from an average of 7,157 in 2012 to 5,026 this fall 2013. Unfortunately, too many students still are unable to pursue their educational goals in California’s community colleges—a result of the current state of de facto “seat rationing,” which threatens the capacity of the colleges to continue their foundational open-access policies.