Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Background: MDRC conducted an evaluation of an unusually comprehensive program designed to help students graduate with an associate’s degree quickly. The City University of New York’s (CUNY’s) Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) began operating in fall 2007. CUNY, who designed and implemented the program, reached out to MDRC to conduct a random assignment study of ASAP beginning in spring 2010. The evaluation of CUNY’s ASAP found that the program increased three-year graduation rates by an estimated 18 percentage points. ASAP’s intent-to-treat effects for students, described in a February 2015 report and forthcoming journal article in American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, are by far the largest estimated effects MDRC has found for a community college intervention.

As a very promising model, ASAP has received national attention. To help understand whether ASAP can be implemented by other colleges, in other settings, serving different populations of students and yield substantial effects, MDRC is leading a project, with CUNY leading the technical assistance of their program, to implement and evaluate ASAP in three community colleges in Ohio: Cincinnati State Technical and Community College, Cuyahoga Community College, and Lorain County Community College.

Intervention: Designed based on CUNY’s ASAP, the Ohio programs are multi-faceted, including requirements and messages (enroll full-time, take developmental courses early, and encouragement to graduate within three years), student services (enhanced advising, careers services and tutoring), financial supports (tuition waiver, monthly incentive, and textbook assistance), and program management (including an MIS and dedicated staffing).

Evaluation: Through a randomized controlled trial, the project seeks to estimate the average effect of the opportunity to participate in the Ohio ASAP demonstration on academic performance. 1,501 students from three Ohio colleges are in the study sample. To be eligible for the program, students must be low-income, credential-seeking and willing to attend college full-time, completed 24 or fewer college-level credits, in good academic standing and in an eligible major.

Findings/Results: Two-year findings from the random assignment evaluation show that the Ohio programs more than doubled two-year graduation rates: 19.1 % percent of the program group have earned a degree or credential compared with 7.9 % of the control group. Persistence and credit accumulation were also higher in the program group. The intervention had similar effects across demographic and academic subgroups (including older and non-traditional students). Additionally, most of the Ohio program components were well implemented, and the total annual direct cost per program group member is roughly $2,300 (significantly less than at CUNY), with some variation across colleges.

Conclusions: The ASAP Ohio demonstration has shown that three colleges in Ohio were largely able to implement programs based on CUNY ASAP and that these programs dramatically improved academic outcomes for students over a two-year follow-up period. Considering the “replication crisis,” these findings are quite remarkable. Despite a different political context and student population, the two-year intent-to-treat effect estimates in Ohio are substantively similar to effects estimated in CUNY, re-affirming CUNY’s model as one on the most promising, evidence-based interventions in postsecondary education.