Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Workers with a college degree earn substantially more, on average, than those without. There has been unprecedented national focus in the last several years on boosting the low graduation rates of students in community colleges. Community colleges serve millions of the nation’s undergraduates, but their graduation rates leave much room for improvement. For full-time, first-time, degree-seeking students entering public two-year schools, only 20 percent graduate with a degree within three years, or 150 percent of what is considered “normal” for an associate’s degree. By five years, that number increases to only 35 percent, while 46 percent of students have not earned a degree and are no longer enrolled in postsecondary education at all. These low graduation rates are especially pronounced among Pell-eligible students, nontraditionally aged students, and students who enter college without the math, reading, or writing skills required for college-level courses and thus need to take remedial courses.

In 2014, three community colleges in Ohio set out to address their low-income students’ needs thoughtfully and comprehensively. Mirroring national trends, graduation rates in these colleges had remained low despite strides made in access. Ready to undertake an entirely new strategy to help low-income students succeed, these colleges turned to a proven-effective program. The City University of New York (CUNY) operates an uncommonly multifaceted and long-lasting program for its community college students: Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP). ASAP provides a rich array of services and supports to help more students graduate and to help them graduate sooner. The program aims to simultaneously address multiple barriers to student success over three full years. MDRC’s random assignment evaluation of CUNY ASAP found that the program nearly doubled graduation rates for students. ASAP’s impacts are unprecedented among the higher education evaluations MDRC has conducted across the country. Given these remarkable findings, a natural next step was to evaluate whether ASAP could be implemented successfully – and improve students’ likelihood of graduation in similar rates – in other locations and institutional contexts.

This paper presents early findings from MDRC’s evaluation of the ASAP Demonstration in Ohio. First, the paper presents a comparison of the Ohio model to the CUNY ASAP model, showing a goal of replicating as many components as possible with a few changes made to fit local context. The paper also discusses the Ohio policy context and ways that the state policy landscape supported or hindered program implementation, including the relevance of performance-based funding for colleges and a significant financial aid policy change made in part due to this evaluation that will reduce program costs long-term. Finally, this paper presents early academic impacts on students, including impacts on enrollment, full-time enrollment, and credit accumulation in the first semester, plus retention to the second semester. This paper will contribute to the ongoing national dialogue about community college success rates and answer important questions about the generalizability of programs successful in one college context to other, dissimilar contexts and for other student groups.