Related Links

• Community College Initiative
• 2024 Survey of Community College Outcomes
• A New Approach to Measuring Community College Outcomes
• Previewing Fall 2024 College Enrollment
• Will Declines in FAFSA Completions Hurt College Enrollment?

Transcript

Tim Sablik: My guests today are Laura Ullrich and Stephanie Norris. Laura is the director and Stephanie the associate director of the Richmond Fed's Community College Initiative. Welcome back to the show.

Laura Ullrich: Thanks so much for having us.

Stephanie Norris: Thanks, Tim. Happy to be here.

Sablik: Regular listeners will have heard us talk about the Richmond Fed's Survey of Community College Outcomes before, an initiative that launched in 2021 as a pilot study with 10 schools.

This past November, you both released the results for the 2024 survey, which included responses from 121 community colleges — nearly all such institutions in the Fifth District. The 2024 survey includes measures of success for students who entered community colleges during the 2019-2020 academic year, the first cohort impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

As you both discussed on the show before, traditional measures of college success don't fully capture the range of students and programs at community colleges. The Richmond Fed survey seeks to fill in that gap. So, maybe you could start by reminding us how you measure success in the survey and how this definition differs from other measures.

Norris: One common measure that we talked about several times is the IPEDS [Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System] 150 percent graduation rate, which is basically the share of first-time, full-time students who earn a degree within 150 percent of the expected time to completion — typically around six years for someone who's seeking a bachelor's degree from a four-year institution. This is a pretty good representation of the pathways students at four-year colleges and universities pursue, but it misses a lot of what students are looking for from a community college. Community colleges really are fundamentally different than four-year colleges and universities, both in who they serve and how they serve them.

The Richmond Fed Success Rate is really designed to complement measures that are out there, rather than replace anything. We're just aiming to add another data point to all the data that people are looking at to make decisions about higher ed.

We want to take a more comprehensive view of who community colleges are serving. We include both full-time and part-time students in our cohort. We include a student who completes an associate degree or other long-term certificate within four years of entry. We expand the time horizon as well from three years to four years, and that's to account for part-time students and students taking non-traditional pathways at a community college.

We also include anyone who earns a workforce-recognized credential. Those are hard to capture. We're starting to capture some of that data. There's a lot of interest in those kind of credentials, both from the employer side and for the student side.

We also capture students who transfer prior to attaining an award or credential. This is a pretty huge population for a lot of community colleges. There are students who are enrolled to earn college credits at a community college but want to eventually get a bachelor's degree. In the IPEDS graduation rate, unless those students earn an associate degree, they're not counted as a success for that community college. But they are a success if they met their educational goals and are carrying on those credits to a four-year institution.

We also want to capture persisters. These are students who, four years after entry, are still enrolled and in good standing at that institution. Even if they haven't earned a credential, some students may just need to take one class at a time, so it will take them a long time to earn an award. But from our perspective, that's okay. If they're still enrolled four years after entry, there's a high likelihood that they will actually complete.

Ullrich: I'll add on to what Stephanie said. Almost everyone that began at a four-year institution this past fall went to start the attainment of a bachelor's degree. That's why you go to a four-year college. That's what's offered there. But there are all these other paths. There are people there that are aiming to get an associate degree, but there are also many people that started at community colleges this fall with the intent and purpose to transfer at the end of this year. Those students are not counted as successes. We're excited to have the opportunity to broaden the definition of success.

Sablik: Thank you both for that overview of the success measure. Maybe now we can dig into some of the data. What are some insights that you gained from examining those success measures for 2024?

Ullrich: The cohort that we're measuring success of is for students who entered sometime during the 2019-2020 academic year. I can remember the exact moment when I realized this was the cohort we were going to be looking at this year. I realized, oh, this is the COVID cohort, right? These are the students who started — some of them in January — before everything shut down in March.

There isn't a ton of research out there yet on the paths that many of these students faced, but the academic research that is out there showed that they faced tremendous hurdles during that academic year. So, we expected to see pretty large declines in success rates this year in the 2024 survey. They went down some, but not by as much as we expected. Students were more resilient and found pathways to success, even in the midst of a considerable disruption.

We're working to build a panel of annual data from these schools and when we have more data, we'll be able to go back and maybe do some in-depth research ourselves about the different paths these students chose. Maybe they were different because of COVID — maybe more students transferred because of it or maybe less students did, right? I think we can't really answer those questions yet.

What we can say is, while there are a sizable number of students who enter a community college that are earning an associate degree over a four-year period, there's also a large number of students that are transferring without a credential. These are students that come and, instead of staying for two years and getting an associate degree and then transfer, they're transferring after one, two, three semesters for a four-year school.

Sablik: Stephanie, you mentioned some of the differences between the Richmond success metric and other measures like the IPEDS measure. How did your findings compare to the IPEDS?

Norris: Earlier this month, IPEDS released the graduation rate for this comparable cohort. We can't do an apples-to-apples comparison between our success rate and the IPEDS graduation rate for a number of reasons. But we still like to use it as a reference because it is so widely used by stakeholders to make decisions.

When we look at the aggregate IPEDS 150 percent time-to-completion graduation rate for the 63 community colleges that we included in our first-look web release and in the webinar, the total aggregate graduation rate was 31 percent. So, 31 percent of first-time, full-time students at these community colleges earned an associate or long-term credentials within three years of entering. That's pretty close to what it was last year.

Our Richmond Fed Success Rate for the same 63 schools was 47 percent, so there's a 16-point gap between the comparable IPEDS graduation rate and our Richmond Fed Success Rate, which makes sense. We really broadened what we count as a success.

There is a lot of variation. There is a variation in the success rate across schools, there is a variation in the graduation rate across schools, and there is a variation in the gap between our success rate and IPEDS graduation rate. There is a school in Maryland that has a 37-percentage-point gap between the Richmond Fed Success Rate for that school and the IPEDS graduation rate.

There are some schools where the IPEDS graduation rate is actually a little bit higher than what we have for the Richmond Fed Success Rate. A lot of what drives this trend is the number of part-time students served by these institutions. We include part-time students in our cohort, even though we know that that will deflate our success rate relative to the IPEDS graduation rate. Across pretty much every measure, part-time students tend to have lower graduation rates, success rates, and achievement rates for various reasons. But this is such an important segment of students for community colleges that we still want to include them.

Ullrich: Our mandate at the Federal Reserve is to work towards maximum employment, right? So, we're focused on the workforce and what the workforce looks like. From a workforce perspective, I don't really care if somebody takes 12 credit hours a semester and it's assigned as a full-time student, or they're taking three credit hours a semester. I still want to know, were they successful over time? So, from our point of view, it is wholly appropriate to include both full-time and part-time students in our metric together.

Sablik: I was going to ask about the differences between full-time and part-time students. Maybe you can dig into what those actual differences are between the success rates.

Ullrich: Our overall Richmond Fed Success Rate was 47 percent. If you split that up between part-time and full-time, our full-time success rate is 57 percent and our part-time is 39 percent. So, there is a large gap between full-time success and part-time success.

I will say there's a bigger gap this year in the full-time and part-time success rates than what we have seen in our two previous surveys. There always has been a gap, but it's larger this year. I think this makes sense given what happened with COVID. Typically, a part-time student is also an employee and/or a parent, so school is just a part of what they are doing. They are more marginally attached to the institution typically. So, I think it makes sense that a disruption like COVID would have caused maybe more of these part-time students to drop out than full-time students.

We think it's important to include [part-time students]. That's an important part of these institutions' story. As Stephanie mentioned, part-time students are a huge part of who community colleges serve. In fact, the part-time cohort is larger than the full-time cohort at the 63 schools that we have success rates for thus far.

Another thing I'll add, which I think is really interesting: if you look at how these students are succeeding, the gap between full-time and part-time students really is in degree attainment. Twenty five percent of the full-time cohort are getting an associate degree in four years. Only 10.3 percent of the part-time students are getting an associate degree over that same period of time.

This gives schools information that they can use like, what is it about this? Why aren't as many of our part-time students achieving degree attainment? It's data that hopefully these schools can use to think about how they're serving their students.

Sablik: Are there any other interesting differences that you spotted, say, like across states?

Ullrich: Yeah, for sure.

Context is so important when we're looking at this because state policy drives some of this. South Carolina has a large percentage — 25 percent of their cohort — [that] transferred to a four-year school before getting a credential. Well, that is driven by some policy in South Carolina. In many states, bridge programs are designed to get people from community colleges to four-year schools. In most states, these are what are called a "two plus two" — you go to community college for two years, you earn your associate degree, then you transfer to the four-year school and finish out the last two years and get a bachelor's degree. But in South Carolina, their bridge programs — one that bridges students to Clemson, one that bridges students to University of South Carolina — are "one plus three" programs where you do one year at the community or technical college and then transfer and do three years at the four-year school.

Some of it might also be driven by workforce needs. West Virginia, for example, has our highest percentage of associate degree attainment: 25 percent. That's much lower in states like South Carolina and Maryland.

Sablik: You mentioned some state differences. What about differences across schools within the same state?

Ullrich: One thing that we're really proud of about our metric is the flexibility. We don't necessarily need to have the same policies in South Carolina as we have in Maryland that we have in West Virginia, right? These states are unique. They have unique workforce needs. This flexibility becomes especially important when you're looking at community colleges within a state.

Community colleges are really unique compared to four-years. One of the most important ways is that community colleges serve a service area. They serve a county or a group of counties. These counties can look really different. You can imagine that Northern Virginia Community College serves a very different set of counties compared to Danville Community College in the lower part of the state, right? They have unique workforce needs. They have unique students. So, at some schools, they should be more transfer focused. At others, they should be more workforce credential focused. That's what we see in our data.

Typically, the most urban schools have more students that are transferring prior to credential attainment. This is wholly appropriate because most of these very urban community colleges serve counties where a higher percentage of the jobs in that region require a bachelor's degree or higher. The more rural campuses typically are issuing more associate degrees and workforce credentials. In these rural communities, fewer jobs require a bachelor's degree or higher. You might have more jobs in trades or in manufacturing, healthcare that don't require a degree, so they have more students that are getting these sub-baccalaureate credentials.

Because we're counting all of these things that are pathways to success, these schools can serve students very, very differently but be equally successful in our metric, which we think is really important due to the uniqueness of the service areas.

Sablik: Shifting gears from talking about success, let's turn to enrollment, which is another area that you looked at. One trend that's been going on for the last 50 years or so in higher education is a shift in the gender composition of students. It shifted from majority male to majority female. Some people have talked about or [have] a concern about declining male participation in higher education. Did you find anything related to this when you examined community college enrollment by gender?

Norris: The gender gap in higher ed is something that comes up when we're out meeting with stakeholders. Employers are talking about it. K-12 leaders are talking about it.

When we look at our credit enrollment or what you think of as a traditional higher ed pathway, we have a 60-40 gender split — 60 percent female, 40 percent male, roughly. That's relatively consistent with overall trends, maybe a little bit less skewed than four-year institutions.

On the other hand, there do tend to be slightly more males enrolling in non-credit workforce credential programs than females. These are very preliminary data. It's one data point. But we're really excited about what we'll be able to learn going forward about how males are entering higher education who were missing, and how schools have found success in attracting these students and finding them the right pathway to the workforce.

Ullrich: This is one of the reasons why, even though the non-credit data are messy, they're worth talking about. There's important insights like this.

Sablik: Continuing on our discussion about enrollment, I wanted to follow up on your last visit to the podcast in July, where we talked about the decline in the Free Application for Federal Student Aid or FAFSA completions. In that show, we talked about how this could have an impact on freshman college and community college enrollment in the fall. I was just curious if you have any updates on that, or if this is something that you're hoping to explore in future surveys

Ullrich: Stephanie and I both all but obsessed following the FAFSA last year — the delay in the form and then the lagging number of FAFSA completions that were coming in. The most recent data show an 8.7 percent decline overall in FAFSA applications last year.

The National Student Clearinghouse released some early Fall 2024 enrollment data that showed that overall fall college enrollment was down 3 percent nationally compared to Fall 2023. In the Fifth District, all but one of our states — West Virginia — saw a decline in enrollment. But the other states saw growth.

One of the things that is really interesting is that that 3 percent enrollment decline is for all of credit-based higher ed, so four-year schools and two-year schools, older students and younger students, everybody. If you look at where the declines really happened in enrollment, you'll see it mostly came in the form of new freshmen, which makes sense given what happened with the FAFSA. Freshman enrollment for students age 18 fell 5.8 percent and FAFSA completions are down 8.7 percent [for] that same group of high school seniors.

If you look at certain demographics, the white freshman enrollment was down in the low double digits. There were certain groups where there were significant declines.

All this being said, community colleges fared well. Stephanie and I've had this theory throughout the entire FAFSA situation that this really might benefit community colleges because four-year schools tend to have pretty tight FAFSA deadlines. So, for students who miss those because of the delay in the FAFSA, they might go to community colleges instead. We don't have the final numbers yet, but we've heard reports across the community colleges in the Fifth District that they saw strong enrollment growth this fall.

I do want to point out, though, that the things we're talking about are only credit enrollment. Most community colleges report that non-credit saw pretty strong growth this fall as well. We'll pick up these data in our survey eventually, right? It'll take a couple years until we have the data for this year, but certainly that's a part of what we're trying to do is measure this over time.

In terms of the future of the survey, I would like to mention that we have decided to start pushing out beyond the Fifth District next year. In 2025, in that round of the survey, we'll be adding around five to 10 states from outside of the Fifth District. Stephanie and I and the rest of the folks that work on this project are working hard right now to identify those states.

Norris: I wanted to add there are a lot of big changing trends in higher ed right now. There's demographic trends. As we move forward, understanding the different pathways and how nontraditional students are entering higher ed is going to be more important. That's one of the things that our survey is going to add insights to, especially since community colleges have always served these non-traditional students.

Sablik: Laura and Stephanie, thanks so much for coming on to share this exciting research, and I'm sure we'll have you both on again soon as the new data comes in.