The Survey of Community College Outcomes (SCCO) is a quantitative, consistent system for measuring community college outcomes that provides a fuller view of what success looks like for community college students.
In our 2025 Survey of Community College Outcomes (SCCO) survey release, we highlighted the unique role that community colleges play in our workforce development system. Community colleges are tasked with offering programs that align with the changing needs of employers, workers, and students in their service areas. Because of the unique role of community colleges, traditional measures of success (usually graduation rates) that include only first-time, full-time, degree-seeking students in a cohort are insufficient to evaluate student success at community colleges. (For more information, see this article.)
The Richmond Fed Success Rate is designed to evaluate success for a set of community college students and programs that reflect the role of community colleges. We start with the traditional graduation rate and then adjust the criteria for the cohort (denominator) and expand the definition of success (numerator). We track each college's 2020-2021 cohort for four years. Here, we explore the implications of the expanded definition for the schools in the Fifth Federal Reserve District.
The Fifth District is home to 122 community colleges1 across five states: North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia.2 Each college serves a unique geographic service area and the structure of each state's education system and community college governance affects community college enrollment, funding, and program offerings. Any institutional measure of student success should be interpreted in the context of each college's student characteristics, funding model, and local economic factors. This context shows up in each institution's cohort as well as the success pathways its students pursue.
Across the 120 community colleges for which we have data, the aggregate Richmond Fed Success rate is 48.8 percent — 15.4 percentage points higher than a comparable aggregate graduation rate for the same schools.
Comparing the success rate compositions of the top performing colleges in each of our five states highlights the need for a flexible measurement of community college success. In the next section, we look at the differences in composition of the cohorts of each state.
The 2025 SCCO captured outcomes for 171,314 students who entered Fifth District community colleges during the 2020-2021 school year. The comparable graduation rate (See RFO Survey release for details) uses just 50,370 students.
What drives the difference in cohort size? Most visibly, the Richmond Fed cohort includes students who enroll part time upon entry, which accounts for 53 percent of the Fifth District cohort. However, there are differences across states.
A student's decision to enroll part time rather than full time could be driven by the student's own financial, family, or job circumstances, but it could also be based on the type of program the student is pursuing. In addition, there is variation within states: Among schools in West Virginia, for example, shares of part-time students range from 9 percent to 47 percent.
Unlike a traditional graduation rate that includes only first-time college students who enroll in the fall, we count students who began or completed degrees at another institution. We also include students who enroll in the winter, spring, or summer terms during the 2020-2021 cohort entry year. This is critical to accurately evaluate community colleges, which provide more flexible on-ramps for non-traditional students than a typical four-year institution.
Students who have a previous college enrollment history and students who spend time in the workforce before enrolling at a community college may require different pathways. For the three states in our district where we have data, the share of students over 25 in the success cohort ranges from 13.6 percent in Virginia to 32.8 percent in West Virginia. This variation in the demographic makeup of the students that each state and institution serves requires community college programming to be flexible in order to enable student success.
Future posts will dig deeper into how state policies, institution characteristics, and local economic drivers influence the magnitude and composition of institution success rates. In this section, we summarize the pathways we track to construct the numerator of the Richmond Fed Success Rate.
The single largest contributor to the Fifth District success rate is associate degree attainment, which accounts for 20.4 percentage points of the overall success rate. Some students in this category earn associate degrees that prepare them to transfer to four-year institutions to complete bachelor's degrees. Others are pursuing workforce-focused associate degrees that will qualify them for careers in health care, trades, information technology, or other fields. At the state level, West Virginia has the highest share of cohort students who earn associate degrees, while Maryland has the lowest share.
Another component of our success rate is students that attained a certificate or diploma. These are students who did not receive an associate degree but were awarded a post-secondary diploma or certificate because they completed an academic or occupational program of study. These can include certified nursing aides, cybersecurity, plumbing, or business analytics. In many cases these certificates and diplomas are stackable, meaning students can receive more than one and use them toward a degree. Students in this category may be earning a certificate on top of existing related credentials to further their career; others may be first-time students enrolling to earn entry-level credentials to begin a new career.
Students who received workforce-recognized credentials represent a much smaller contribution to the success rate (0.2 percentage points). Only two Fifth District states — Maryland and Virginia — reported any students in this category. The awards that fall into this category are diverse and evolve as industry needs change, but in general, the category is designed to capture a workforce pathway taken by students who enroll in a traditional credit-bearing degree or certificate program but do not complete the program.
Some of these programs fall into the category of non-credit certificates and industry credentials. For example, a student who enrolls in an associate degree program in welding may earn an industry certification from the American Welding Society while working toward the degree. If the student uses the industry certification to transition to the workforce and does not finish the associate degree program within the cohort measurement timeframe, this student is not counted as a success in a school's graduation rate.
While non-credit and credentialing programs are critical in our workforce development system, capturing these students can be challenge — one that is not addressed consistently across schools in the Fifth District or nationwide. Thus, for now, the Richmond Fed captures a very limited subset of these students, but it will ultimately be important to include these students to paint a full picture of community colleges.
The second largest share of successful students did not earn a degree, certificate, or workforce credential but transferred to a four-year institution by the end of the measurement period. In some states, and particularly in some communities, preparing students for a four-year institution is a key role of community colleges; however, community colleges do not get credit for transfers in traditional graduation rates unless the students are awarded an associate degree or certificate. As a result, large swaths of students of left out of these rates. States with transfer pathways to four-year universities that do not require associate degrees (e.g., South Carolina) tend to see greater contributions of transfer students to student success compared to states like Virginia, where many transfer agreements require a community college student to attain an associate degree before transferring.
Our final success category is for students who, at the end of the measurement period, have not earned any credential or transferred to a four-year institution but remain in good standing at the institution. Also known as persisters, we initially expected them to be part-time students who require more time to complete their program. However, in every Fifth District state but Maryland, full-time students comprise the majority of persisters. Of course, classifying students as part time or full time based on their first semester may ultimately result in a mischaracterization of full-time versus part-time status.
In four-year institutions, there are many students who don't graduate. Similarly, there are many students who don't successfully complete or persist in their chosen educational path at community colleges. Some of the 99,575 students who do not succeed by the Richmond Fed success measure simply do not complete their path. However, others might simply be mismeasured. For example, even with the broader measure of success, we will miss students who succeed along dimensions such as:
Because students do not always enter college with the same goal, defining short-term community college success by a single measure is challenging. The Richmond Fed Success Rate also does not capture the long-term benefits of community college on labor market outcomes. However, we hope that our work illustrates the importance of measuring community college success based on who community colleges serve and the pathways they provide.
We use the term community colleges broadly to represent community colleges (Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina); technical colleges (South Carolina); and community and technical colleges (West Virginia).
The Fifth District excludes the northern panhandle of West Virginia, but we include all of the state's community colleges in our study for completeness.
Views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond or the Federal Reserve System.
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