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The Survey of Community College Outcomes: Past, Present, and Future

By Laura Dawson Ullrich
Community College Insights
September 12, 2024
Stephanie Norris, Jacob Walker, Laura Ullrich, and Jill Williams at an event for Community Colleges of Appalachia.
Stephanie Norris, Jacob Walker, Laura Ullrich, and Jill Williams at an event for Community Colleges of Appalachia.

When we started the Richmond Fed's Survey of Community College Outcomes in 2021, our primary goal was developing a metric to understand how well community colleges were performing across the Fifth District. Over the past three years, we have interacted with a wide array of community college stakeholders, learning from experts and gaining knowledge about the range of community college data that are currently available. As we wrap up our 2024 data collection and prepare to make our results public in November, this post highlights what we've done so far, what we're working on this year, and what our future plans are for the project.

Where We Started

In 2019 and 2020, we began increasing our outreach to community colleges across the Fifth District to learn more about how these institutions approached education and the workforce pipeline. We visited campuses across all five states in our district and met virtually with leaders from many others. There were common themes that emerged: frustrations about funding formulas, adjustments required to serve students during the pandemic, issues with the public perception of community colleges, and concerns about enrollment patterns. (See here for past posts about many of these topics.)

There was one issue that came up repeatedly: federal measurement (or rather mismeasurement) of what constitutes "success" at a community college. College administrators frequently criticized the way that graduation rates are calculated and the fact that the fastest growing parts of their institutions (non-credit and dual enrollment programs) are not counted in graduation rates at all.

Laura Ullrich presenting results from the Richmond Fed Survey of Community College Outcomes.

Laura Ullrich presenting results from the Richmond Fed's Survey of Community College Outcomes.

We decided that we had the inputs needed to consider collecting some of the data that was "missing" in the storytelling of community colleges. As a large research institution, we have expertise in data analysis and data collection, and we also have valued relationships we have gained via outreach in our district communities.

In 2021, we embarked on a pilot, engaging 10 community colleges across the district. We included a mix of rural and urban schools that were representative of our diverse region. These schools provided us with deep insight into how they collect and report data, and they explained in detail how they measure success internally. We learned that each of the five states have a range of their own success metrics, which were very helpful to us in deciding the path forward. While these metrics were all very useful, they were also all different, and it was not possible to compare the success of institutions across states. After not only many hours of conversations with leaders from the pilot schools, but also consideration of our conversations with other institutions, we decided to create a survey that would collect data in four different categories:

  • Credit enrollment and calculation of the Richmond Fed Success Rate
  • Non-credit enrollment
  • Dual enrollment
  • Wraparound services
Laura Ullrich and Stephanie Norris with faculty from Roanoke-Chowan Community College.

Laura Ullrich and Stephanie Norris with administrators from Roanoke-Chowan Community College.

We received data from nine schools, which indicated that the Richmond Fed Success Rate resulted in success rates that were almost always higher than the federally calculated graduation rates. We also found that the institutions were serving large numbers of students in non-credit and dual enrollment programs, with many of these students achieving positive outcomes, including degrees, certificates, credentials, and transfers to four-year institutions.

After the successful pilot in 2022, we decided to expand as much as possible in 2023, obtaining data from 63 schools across Maryland, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia. This expansion led to a considerable amount of engagement with external stakeholders, including policymakers, think tanks, academic researchers, nonprofit funders, and many others. Our results solidified the following as we moved into 2024:

  • Our success metric measures success across a broader number of students and counts a broader set of awards and outcomes and successes than is typical in graduation rate calculations. Our metric is a more accurate measure, therefore, of overall workforce credential attainment.
  • The data on non-credit students vary in quality and detail across schools and systems. However, the growing interest in short-term workforce programs means we need to take steps to collect and report on non-credit enrollment and outcomes.
  • For some schools, dual enrollment students account for a large share of enrollment at community colleges. There is much more we need to know about this group of students and the role community colleges should play in K-12 education.
  • Wraparound service data are not available broadly, and community colleges are spending a large amount of resources providing them to students in an attempt to improve student outcomes. There is a high degree of interest in these data across a multitude of stakeholders, and we realized we needed to expand on this work as we moved forward.

Where We Are

The growth we've experienced in 2024 has been both exciting and overwhelming. We are excited to announce that we currently have data for 121 community colleges, and the survey now includes schools from all five Fifth District states.

This year will provide an opportunity to observe the success rates of the first COVID-19-era cohort: students who entered institutions during the 2019-2020 academic year. These students experienced extraordinarily unique challenges, with some starting school just weeks before having to move to a fully virtual environment. We are eager to discuss how the success of these students vary by demographics and geography.

We took the insights from our previous pilots and incorporated them into the 2024 survey. For example, we added age as a demographic so that we can observe how students across age groups experience success, and whether this varies by gender. In addition, we also separated out different types of awards (degrees/diplomas and certificates/credentials) so that we can observe shifts in success rates across different award types over time.

While we have made small adjustments to the survey, the measurement of credit, non-credit and dual enrollment remains remarkably similar to our original pilot. Significant changes, however, were made to the wraparound services portion of the data collection effort. We realized that we needed to go a bit broader and deeper in this space, and that there is considerable interest in these data beyond what we had initially expected. This year, we sent out a separate survey to student service professionals. The current response rate is close to 60 percent across the district, and we will continue to work to grow this number even further. We will have specific data on child care, transportation, food security, and parent-student wraparound services, just to name a few.

Note

We encourage you to forward this opportunity to people you know who are interested and to also post it on social media platforms. The event is free and open to everyone.

On Tuesday, Nov. 19, we will host a public webinar to share the results from our 2024 survey. This 90-minute event will include an overview of our data as well as a conversation with two of the participating institutions.

This event will begin our communication around survey results, which will go live on our website on the same day. We look forward to presenting our findings at multiple venues in the months to come. In addition, we remain eager to collaborate with interested stakeholders in the community college and workforce spaces, and we welcome contact regarding our work.

Where We're Going

When we started this work three years ago, we could have never anticipated the growth we have experienced. Based on communication with dozens of stakeholders, we believe that states outside of the Fifth District can also benefit from the collection of these data in their states. The more community colleges we have represented in the survey, the more research can be done, and hopefully the more policy can be created to improve student and workforce outcomes.

To this point, we have decided to expand our work nationally in 2025. We hope to expand to several states outside of the Fifth District and to grow it further in the years to come. Our team has been presenting our work at national conferences and has been communicating with community college, system and state agency leaders across the country.

The goal of our team at the Richmond Fed is to improve the pipeline from K-12 education to employment in order to improve workforce outcomes across our district and beyond. This aligns with our mandate from Congress to work toward maximum employment. Community colleges play an incredibly important role in this process, and collecting data that better tell the full story of their program or service offerings will improve the research and policy decision-making in this space.

If your community college or state organization is interested in participating in our survey, we encourage you to reach out! You can email me at laura.ullrich@rich.frb.org or you can fill out the interest form.


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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