Institutional Effectiveness and Student Success: A Study of High- and Low-Impact Community Colleges

Abstract

There has been little research on institutional effectiveness at community colleges. A key challenge is how to compare colleges that serve students with widely varying characteristics. Using transcript-level data on over 150,000 Florida community college students, we estimated the effect on the graduation, transfer, and persistence rates of minority students at each of the 28 Florida community colleges as a proxy for institutional effectiveness. We ranked the colleges based on these estimated effects and selected six colleges for field research—3 that had a high impact on minority student success and three that had a low impact. Our fieldwork focused on a set of 7 elements of institutional policy, practice, and culture that we hypothesized are important for promoting student success. We found that the high-impact colleges were more likely than the low-impact colleges to coordinate their programs and services to support student success. We also found that minority students were generally more successful in colleges that had support services targeted specifically to their needs. The study suggests that a more important factor for institutional effectiveness than adopting particular policies or practices is how well a college manages and aligns its programs and services to support student success.