Supporting Community College Student Success: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial

Abstract

This paper presents findings from a randomized controlled trial studying a comprehensive program designed to support students in achieving their goals. One Million Degrees (OMD) is a nonprofit organization serving community college students in the Chicago metro area that supports students financially, academically, personally, and professionally. Results from our study demonstrate that the randomized offer of a spot in the OMD program leads to a statistically significant and substantively meaningful increase in community college enrollment, persistence, and associate’s degree attainment three years after randomization. Applicants who applied while still in high school were less likely to take up the offer of the program than students who were already enrolled in community college, but those high school students who enrolled outperformed their control group peers by a substantially larger margin. Finally, we find the program does not appear to affect the likelihood that students will enroll in a four-year college.

Keywords:

• Community colleges
• RCT
• comprehensive support programs
• college completion

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to One Million Degrees, City Colleges of Chicago, and Harper College for their partnership on this project. We would like to thank Carmelo Barbaro and Roseanna Ander for their consistent support of this project and Madeline Aden, Emma Shirey, Owen McCarthy, Nhu Nguyen, and Grace Su for research assistance. This report uses data that was provided by One Million Degrees and the National Student Clearinghouse. Points of view or opinions contained within this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent official positions or policies of Harper College or City Colleges of Chicago.

Disclosure Statement

The lead author (the manuscript’s guarantor) affirms that the manuscript is an honest, accurate, and transparent account of the study being reported; that no important aspects of the study have been omitted; and that any discrepancies from the study as planned (and, if relevant, registered) have been explained.

Data Availability Statement

The data and syntax are available at the following location: https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/115941/version/V1/view/.

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Preregistered through Open Practices Disclosure. The preregistration is available at https://osf.io/az8x9. To obtain the author's disclosure form, please contact the Editor.

Open Research Statements

Study and Analysis Plan Registration

The study registration with an analysis plan can be found at the following locations: https://osf.io/az8x9, https://osf.io/4jtcy/files/osfstorage, https://osf.io/z235s/files/osfstorage, and https://osf.io/pcdnx/files/osfstorage.

Data, Code, and Materials Transparency

The materials, data, and code for this study are not publicly available.

Design and Analysis Reporting Guidelines

This manuscript was accepted prior to JREE creating and implementing its Randomized Trial Checklist in April 2022.

Transparency Declaration

The lead author (the manuscript’s guarantor) affirms that the manuscript is an honest, accurate, and transparent account of the study being reported; that no important aspects of the study have been omitted; and that any discrepancies from the study as planned (and, if relevant, registered) have been explained.

Replication Statement

This manuscript reports an original study.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Of the original 4,896 applicants who were randomized, one application was excluded because OMD had no record of this applicant, so we were not able to observe take-up. An additional 16 cases were excluded from this analysis; five of these students should have been excluded from randomization because they had a sibling from the program, and 12 students were missing a birthdate and therefore could not be linked to the NSC data. Consequently, the analytic sample contains 4,878 unique applicants.

2 Enough time has not yet elapsed to follow the third cohort of study students over the course of the entire three-year period post-randomization. However, given the third cohort was much smaller than the first two, we do not expect the key takeaways from the study to change when its data are available.

3 Differences in program implementation (i.e., CUNY administers the program directly to its students) resulted in the CUNY ASAP program having nearly perfect program take-up, so the TOT effects from our study are most comparable to the effects estimated in the study of the CUNY ASAP program.

Additional information

Funding

This project grants from the Spencer Foundation, A Better Chicago, the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) North America, the Crankstart Foundation and Arnold Ventures.