Policy Briefs and Publications
ACHIEVING THE DREAM POLICY BRIEFS
It has been nearly six years since the first round states and colleges signed on to the then-new Achieving the Dream initiative. From the beginning, a key question for those involved has been, "What constitutes success in an initiative such as Achieving the Dream?" Jobs for the Future has spent the last few months reviewing available data and materials in an effort to paint a broad brush picture of the most promising trends and outcomes from the initiative's state policy component. These two reports create an aggregate summary of the results of the hard work of the 15 states involved in the demonstration phase of this initiative—and underscore the value to participating states of their involvement in Achieving the Dream.
Good Data. Strong Commitment. Better Policy. Improved Outcomes. ** NEW **
Author: Jobs for the Future
Date: April 2010
When Achieving the Dream began in 2004, few states had improving community college student success as a paramount policy priority. A central goal of the initiative has been to demonstrate that states (and colleges) could create a policy environment more conducive to institutional change strategies that improve student outcomes. This report highlights the collective experience of participating states in five priorities of Achieving the Dream's state policy framework--public commitment to student success; use of data to improve student outcomes; streamlined student assessment and placement; incentives to promote student persistence and completion; and easier student transitions across education systems. Using information from the states' annual policy self-assessments as well as specific examples of policy changes states targeted and achieved, the report draws attention to the significant accomplishments of the states in their efforts to make the policy environment more conducive to increased student persistence and completion. Download the full report. 
Altered State: How the Virginia Community College System Has Used Achieving the Dream to Improve Student Success. ** NEW **
Author: Kay Mills
Date: April 2010
An in-depth look at how one state system—the Virginia Community College System—took advantage of its participation in Achieving the Dream to advance its success agenda. The experience of Virginia, a first-round Achieving the Dream state, describes concrete strategies for moving a data-driven student success policy agenda at the state level. This case study summarizes the evolution and progress of the Virginia Community College System's strategies and tells a powerful story of how one system has leveraged Achieving the Dream to reorient priorities, put student success front and center, and effect significant changes in both administrative practices and policies and legislative action. Download the full report.
Setting Up Success In Developmental Education: How State Policy Can Help Community Colleges Improve Student Outcomes (Full report)
Author: Michael Lawrence Collins
Date: June 2009
The large number of students in community colleges who must take developmental or remedial education courses before they can succeed in college-level work severely threatens their chances of earning credentials and degrees. It also contributes to the erosion of the nation's primacy in education attainment among competitor nations. This policy brief describes the important role that state policy can play in helping community colleges advance students who are placed in developmental education. Setting Up Success in Developmental Education highlights the ways in which 15 states have approached improving outcomes for students who test into developmental education. These states —Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and Washington — are participants in Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count, a national initiative focused on student success and funded by Lumina Foundation for Education and 18 other funders.
Download the Executive Summary
It's Not About the Cut Score: Redesigning Placement Assessment Policy to Improve Student Success (Full report)
Author: Michael Lawrence Collins
Date: July 2008
Placement assessment policy, which governs how colleges assess the academic skills of entering students and place them in courses that are appropriate for their skill levels, can be an important lever for increasing student success in community colleges. A coherent policy would indicate which students must be assessed, specify assessment instruments, set cut score standards, and articulate procedures to be used uniformly across a state. Well-designed placement assessment policies also can help increase student success in a number of ways, and they can be used to help improve the college readiness of incoming students.
With these benefits in mind, many states are evaluating their placement assessment policies, or lack thereof. As they do, they are finding that setting placement assessment policy is not a simple process. This brief describes the experiences of Virginia, Connecticut, and North Carolina as they revised their placement assessment policies, explores current policies in all states, and makes recommendations for states that seek to evaluate and revise their policies. Virginia, Connecticut, and North Carolina all participate in Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count, a multiyear, national initiative designed to help more community college students succeed—complete courses, earn certificates and earn degrees. The brief include a detailed resource guide on policies in Achieving the Dream states.
Download the Executive Summary
Test Drive: Six States Pilot Better Ways to Measure and Compare Community College Performance (Full report)
Author: Jobs for the Future
Date: July 2008
Across higher education, there is growing interest in strengthening state data and performance measurement systems that track and make visible student progress and success. The goal is to improve student results, particularly at community colleges and non-selective four-year institutions. The strategy is to identify at-risk students early and provide them with supports that can help them stay in school and graduate.
This policy brief grew out of the work of the Cross-State Data Work Group, a collaboration among seven states that are participants in Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count. The work group is developing a set of indicators that states can use to more effectively track student performance, evaluate the effectiveness of interventions, and learn from the strengths of other community college systems. This guide is intended to help states design and implement performance measurement and data systems to maximize improvement, particularly for students who traditionally have not fared well in college.
A short self-assessment tool to help guide states through this design and implementation process is included in the appendix of the report.
Download the Executive Summary
Power Tools: Designing State Community College Data and Performance Measurement Systems to Increase Student Success (Full report)
Author: Jobs for the Future
Date: October 2007
Increasing demand for at least some postsecondary education in today’s labor market has met with stagnating college completion rates. As a result, states have a growing interest in better understanding the challenges to improving graduation rates and in tracking student progress and success. Six states in the Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count initiative have designed and tested a more complete and accurate way of measuring community college student performance and success. Test Drive describes this new approach and compares it to the current federal system, highlights key findings from the pilot testing process and the links between state policies and the varying state results, and identifies the group’s priorities for further refining the new measures and related benchmarks.
The ultimate goal is to design a set of measures that accurately describe and track the multiple successful outcomes that community college students attain and to identify the warning signs of struggling students early enough in their educational careers to help keep them on track. This richer set of measures will help colleges tell a more complete and true story of their students’ educational progress and help them identify stumbling blocks in the road and ultimately improve progress and outcomes.
Download the Executive Summary
Accelerating Remedial Math Education: How Institutional Innovation and State Policy Interact (Full report)
Author: Radha Roy Biswas
Date: September 2007
Success in developmental education has emerged as a top priority for institutions and states participating in Achieving the Dream, a national initiative on community college success. As some colleges have begun experimenting with alternative delivery and design approaches for remedial math, the institutions are guided and sometimes limited by systems and state policies—around enrollment, financial aid, funding, data systems, and accountability. These policies often reinforce the traditional design and delivery of developmental education and make flexible delivery difficult.
This policy brief looks at efforts in three community colleges, two of which are Achieving the Dream institutions, to revamp their remedial math programming. These three colleges and their efforts to accelerate developmental math provide an important and instructive window on how institutional practice can be shaped by state and system policies—and by shifts in policies. They also demonstrate how important it is for college innovators to work closely with state and system policymakers to protect and promote efforts that show promise to improve student success at the college level.
A Supporting Role: How Accreditors Can Help Promote the Success of Community College Students (Full report)
Author: Radha Roy Biswas
Date: October 2006
To what extent can the accreditation process drive significant improvement in student persistence and completion at institutions that undergo the peer review process, particularly for students from groups traditionally underrepresented in higher education? Because this inquiry was prepared for Achieving the Dream, a national initiative on community college student success involving nine states and fifty-seven community colleges, the particular interest is accreditation as it plays out in the community college sector.
Money on the Table: State Initiatives to Improve Financial Aid Participation (Full report)
Author: Heath Prince
Date: October 2006
Increasing the numbers of students who participate in financial aid programs has become a critical issue for many state systems. Reasons for the low rates of financial aid uptake vary, from lack of awareness among students to the many and complex types of aid available to inadequate capacity at the institutional level for conducting outreach to students and processing financial aid applications. This brief highlights the activities of four states to address this issue, which is central to Achieving the Dream, a national initiative to help more community college students succeed, particularly low-income students and students of color. It draws on experiences in three states that later joined Achieving the Dream-Connecticut, North Carolina, and Texas-as well as California.
State Policy Audit - State Policy to Achieve the Dream in Five States (Full report)
Author: Kevin Dougherty
Date: February 2006
Kevin Dougherty of Teachers College, Columbia University is conducting a national audit of state policies that affect students’ access to and success in community college. The audit will include case studies of the seven Achieving the Dream states and a survey of all 50 states. The first set of reports on the first five Achieving the Dream states is now available. The full report, "State Policy to Achieve the Dream in Five States," provides detailed policy audits of Florida, New Mexico, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, as well as a chapter and detailed tables providing cross-case analysis of patterns across the five states and recommendations for future state policy. "Five States of Policy" provides a condensed summary of the full report. (View condensed summary - Five States of Policy )
Making Performance Accountability Work: English Lessons for U.S. Community Colleges
Author: Ozan Jaquette
Date: February 2006
In the United States, efforts to use performance accountability as a way to drive improvement in public higher education institutions and systems have yielded mixed results. A more encouraging story has unfolded in England. There, a nationwide accountability system for further education colleges—England’s community-college counterparts—has led to impressive increases in student outcomes since it was implemented in 1992. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds have made particularly large gains. Making Performance Accountability Work takes a detailed look at the policy innovations in England. For U.S. policymakers, they provide both reason for caution and guidance for designing and implementing better performance measurement and funding systems.
State Systems of Performance Accountability for Community Colleges: Impact and Lessons for Policymakers
Author: Kevin Dougherty and Esther Hong of the Community College Research Center , Teachers College, Columbia University
Date: July 2005
This brief looks at trends in performance accountability in state higher education systems, focusing on the five Achieving the Dream states (Florida, New Mexico, North Carolina, Texas and Virginia) and four other states (California, Illinois, New York and Washington). The brief describes three different types of performance accountability systems: performance funding; performance budgeting; and performance reporting. It assesses the reasons behind the modest impacts of performance accountability in the nine states. The authors document problematic unintended consequences as well. The report proposes a series of design changes that can help institutions and states avoid problems of current performance accountability systems.
State Data Systems and Privacy Concerns: Strategies for Balancing Public Interests
Author: Jack Mills, Jobs for the Future
Date: February 2005
Better institutional systems for collecting and reporting student outcome data could help institutional, state, and national policymakers improve student outcomes, yet the collection of data confronts a powerful public interest: individual privacy. This policy brief explores how states can balance the interests of accountability and privacy. It describes how states have addressed the collection and use of student record data within the limits and constraints set by federal privacy laws, with particular reference to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).
Some states stuck a good balance between preserving individual privacy and using individually identifiable data records to drive institutional improvement. Some states have created “data warehouses” and have the analytic capacity to identify inequities in educational outcomes for students from different population groups. The lessons from these states and their approaches can be helpful to other states as they try to address the need for more student outcome data in a time of great concern about individual privacy.
Access to Community College for Undocumented Immigrants: A Guide for State Policy Makers
Author: Radha Roy Biswas, Job for the Future
Date: January 2005
Faced with a growing number of undocumented immigrant students graduating from their high school, many states—including the first five Achieving the Dream states—are assessing and revising their policies related to access and affordability of higher education for undocumented students. Some states have passed laws to clarify policies on enrollment, tuition, and financial aid in order to expand opportunity for these students. Others have taken steps in the opposite direction, reducing access and opportunity in response to political opposition against granting public benefits to undocumented immigrants. In some states, community colleges have pre-empted state action and taken proactive steps to increase access. Others are waiting for clear federal and state guidance. This brief explores being taken by states and institutions, and provides guidelines for policymakers contemplating the politics and policy options around serving undocumented students.
Update: State Policies Regarding In-state Tuition for Undocumented Students
Author: Radha Roy Biswas
Date: March 2007
In JFF's January 2005 brief, Access to Community College for Undocumented Students: A Guide for State Policymakers, we reported on trends and developments in Achieving the Dream states around tuition and financial aid for undocumented students. We had noted in that brief that since 2001, about twenty states had introduced bills around providing in-state tuition to undocumented immigrant students, and seven states had passed legislation awarding in-state tuition to these students. In 2006, the number of states that had introduced legislation rose to thirty, and the number of states that had passed legislation to provide in-state tuition rose to ten. In this update, we report trends and further developments in this policy area.
Standardization vs. Flexibility: State Policy Options on Placement Testing for Developmental Education in Community Colleges
Author:Heath Prince, Jobs for the Future
Date:April 2005
Many students entering community colleges are academically unprepared to succeed in college-level courses, and about one-third of community college students nationally take at least one developmental education course. Given the importance of remediation—as well as its costs and often disappointing results—states are exploring ways to improve developmental education in community colleges. This policy brief describes some of the options and tradeoffs that states encounter as they try to systemize decisions about which students must enroll in developmental education courses. The brief documents variation in policies around mandatory testing, cut scores, and placement in the Achieving the Dream states and several other states.
OTHER POLICY PUBLICATIONS
Low-income Students Miss Out on Federal Aid: Even as the price of college rises, more low-income students who would likely get federal financial aid are not applying, according to an American Council on Education report. The report estimates that 1.5 million students who would probably have been awarded Pell Grants in 2003-04 did not apply for them. That’s up from the ACE’s estimate in a previous survey of 850,000 who missed out on aid in 1999-2000. A major reason is probably confusion over the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form. The ACE study finds that the percentage of undergraduates completing FAFSA rose from 50 percent to 59 percent over the four-year period it studied, and the number of applications increased by nearly 3 million, to 11.1 million. But the number of low-income students who did not file rose from 1.7 million to 1.8 million, or 28 percent of low-income students. Visit ACE's Web site to download the report.
Data on Trends in State Funding for Community Colleges: An article in the excellent new higher education newspaper Inside Higher Ed reports on the historic erosion of government support for community colleges in the last 20 years. Reporting on a doctoral dissertation by Billy Roessler at the University of North Texas, the article includes findings such as these: In 1980-81, 16 states contributed at least 60 percent of the budgets of their community colleges. By 2000-01, none did so. In 1980-81, 22 states contributed at least half of the budgets for their community colleges, which enrolled 55 percent of all community college students in the country. By 2000-01, only 7 states—enrolling 8 percent of community college students—did so. Visit Inside Higher Ed to read the full article.
Listening Tour: In 2004, the Futures Project of Brown University led a Policy Listening Tour for Achieving the Dream in the five Round One States: Florida, Texas, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Virginia. In each state, Achieving the Dream representatives met with stakeholders to discuss existing state policies and programs that promote student success and opportunities to advance new policies. The meetings included leaders from community colleges, other educational institutions and systems, state legislative and executive branches, and business and advocacy groups. View the Listening Tour produced several reports.
Public opinion research about community colleges: In 2004, a national study examined public perceptions of community colleges and ways to raise the profile of these institutions. The study, Expanding Opportunity: Communicating about the Role of Community Colleges, found that Americans have highly favorable attitudes toward community colleges. People value community colleges because they provide opportunity for individuals to better themselves. Yet the public has limited awareness of the struggles community colleges face as they try to meet increasing demands with fewer resources. Download the full report. Besides the national report, the study produced state-level reports on several Achieving the Dream states. To view them, go a particular state at Achieving the Dream States.