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In a corequisite approach to developmental education, students enroll in a college-level course paired concurrently with a support course designed to address student learning needs in a given subject. This report, sponsored by Strong Start to Finish, examines early college outcomes of students placed into corequisite reading courses at the 13 community colleges in the Tennessee Board of Regents (TBR) system. The authors investigate how outcomes changed since TBR colleges adopted a corequisite approach in reading and look at differences in outcomes by college-level course pairings and course features, including delivery format (online, hybrid, and face-to-face). Since TBR mandated corequisite approaches to serving students with developmental needs in 2015, students placed into developmental education experienced substantial improvements in gateway course outcomes. Drawing on these and other findings, the authors offer the following recommendations to institutions seeking to improve supports for students who need learning support in reading. (1) Institutions should enroll all students deemed underprepared in reading in corequisite courses in their first term, keeping in mind that high school GPA is a stronger predictor of college success than standardized test scores; (2) Given the study finding that a nontrivial proportion of students referred to corequisite reading did not pass any courses they enrolled in, institutions should consider embedded supports to address a range of academic and non-academic challenges hindering student success; (3) To address racial disparities in placement into developmental education and in course outcomes, institutions should adopt race-conscious frameworks to plan and implement corequisite reading policies and practices; and (4) The study found that taking corequisite reading and a college-level pairing online was associated with significantly lower success rates. Institutions should look to strengthen the design and delivery of online corequisite reading models.

This report describes findings from a study of the Engaging Adjunct Faculty in the Student Success Movement project, a two-year initiative led by Achieving the Dream to develop and implement strategies to support adjunct faculty in improving student outcomes. Work in the project--guided by design principles related to classroom activities, professional development, employment policies, and the use of data--was led by teams of full- and part-time faculty and administrators at six participating community colleges. A key objective of the project was to generate information about promising, scalable, and sustainable engagement strategies that could be shared across the national network of Achieving the Dream colleges. Using survey, interview, and student transcript data, CCRC documented a range of strategies that colleges designed to support and engage their adjunct faculty, examined how the strategies were implemented, and measured the effects of a set of selected activities on faculty and students. Drawing on implementation findings presented in this report, the authors offer four recommendations for colleges seeking to provide supports for part-time faculty: (1) Ground decisions on adjunct faculty supports in local data on adjunct faculty needs; (2) Embed adjunct faculty supports into existing institutional infrastructure and initiatives; (3) Examine college policies and practices that impact the working lives of adjunct faculty; and (4) Consider intended outcomes for faculty engagement strategies and create a plan for measurement.

Corequisite remediation, which mainstreams students deemed academically underprepared into college-level courses with additional learning support, is rapidly being adopted by colleges across the nation. This paper provides the first causal evidence on a system-wide corequisite reform, using data from all 13 community colleges affiliated with the Tennessee Board of Regents. Using regression discontinuity and difference-in-regression-discontinuity designs, we estimated the causal effects of placement into corequisite remediation compared with placement into traditional prerequisite remediation and direct placement into college-level courses. For students on the margin of the college readiness threshold, those placed into corequisite remediation were 15 percentage points more likely to pass gateway math and 13 percentage points more likely to pass gateway English within one year of enrollment than similar students placed into prerequisite remediation. Compared with their counterparts placed directly into college-level courses, students placed into corequisite remediation had similar gateway course completion rates and were about 8 percentage points more likely to enroll in and pass a subsequent college-level math course after completing gateway math. The positive effects of corequisite remediation compared with prerequisite remediation in math were largely driven by efforts to guide students to take math courses aligned with the requirements for their program rather than placing most students into the algebra-calculus track by default, as has been the standard practice. We found no significant impacts of placement into corequisite remediation on enrollment persistence, transfer to a four-year college, or degree completion. This suggests that corequisite reforms, though effective in helping students pass college-level math and English, are not sufficient to improve college completion rates overall.

More than half of community college courses are taught by part-time faculty, and the reliance on part-time faculty to teach developmental education courses and gateway math and English courses is even more prevalent. Drawing on data from six community colleges, this study estimates the effects of part-time faculty versus full-time faculty on students' current and subsequent course outcomes in developmental and gateway courses, using course fixed effects and propensity score matching to minimize bias arising from student self-sorting across and within courses. While students with part-time instructors have better outcomes in their current course and similar pass rates in the next course in the sequence, they are 3 to 5 percentage points less likely to enroll in that subsequent course. The negative effects on subsequent enrollment are driven by results in math courses. Notably, the estimated effects do not change substantially after controlling for instructors' demographic characteristics and degree attainment, but the size of the estimated effects is reduced by up to 40% when the analytic model accounts for course scheduling. Results of a survey on faculty professional experiences at the six colleges in the study suggest that part-time faculty had less institutional knowledge than full-time faculty did about both academic and nonacademic services. Given that part-time faculty did not have negative effects on the pass rates of students who did enroll in subsequent courses, it appears more likely that inferior working conditions for part-time faculty, rather than inferior instructional practices, are driving the negative effects on students' subsequent course enrollment.

Community college transfer students encounter challenges progressing toward a bachelor's degree, leading to widespread transfer credit loss. This in turn may lower students' chances of credential completion and increase the time and costs for students, their families, and taxpayers. In this study we review three definitions of credit transfer inefficiency--"credit transferability," "credit applicability," and "excess credits among completers"--focusing on the last to examine why students who start at a community college and transfer to a four-year institution so often end up with excess credits that do not count toward a bachelor's degree. To shed light on credit transfer inefficiency, we examine the course-taking behaviors of community college transfer students who earn bachelor's degrees with numerous excess credits compared with transfer students who earn bachelor's degrees with few excess credits. We employ data-mining techniques to analyze student transcripts from two state systems, enabling us to examine a large number of variables that could explain the variation in students' excess credits at graduation. These variables include not only student demographics but also the types and timing of courses taken. Overall, we find more excess credits associated with several factors, including taking larger proportions of 100- and 200-level courses and smaller proportions of 300-level courses throughout students' progression toward completion, and taking 100-level courses in any subject--and specifically 100-level math courses--immediately after transferring to a four-year institution. Findings suggest that institutions could help students reduce credit transfer inefficiency by encouraging them to explore and choose a bachelor's degree major early on so they can take the required lower division (100- and 200-level) courses at the community college, thereby enabling them to take mostly upper division 300- and 400-level courses in their desired major field once they transfer to a four-year institution.

While preparing students academically for vertical transfer to four-year colleges has traditionally been viewed as the major responsibility of the home institutions, there is a growing consensus that the receiving institutions play a critical role in facilitating the transfer process and in supporting students' academic success after transfer. The goal of improving transfer outcomes cannot be fully achieved until colleges nationwide are provided with commonly accepted metrics and methods for measuring the effectiveness of transfer partnerships. Using the individual term-by-term college enrollment records from the National Student Clearinghouse for the entire 2007 fall cohort of first-time-in-college community college students nationwide, this paper introduces a two-stage, input-adjusted, value-added analytic framework for identifying partnerships of two- and four-year institutions that are more effective than expected in enabling community college students to transfer to a four-year institution and earn a bachelor's degree in a timely fashion. In doing so, the paper provides a description of transfer patterns nationwide, broken out by key institutional characteristics. Recommendations and cautions for using this framework to evaluate and benchmark institutional performance in terms of supporting the academic success of vertical transfer students for baccalaureate attainment are also discussed.

Based on a dataset on two- and four-year college students and instructors from an anonymous state that includes detailed instructor employment information, this paper classifies faculty into four types--tenured instructors, tenure-track instructors, long-term adjuncts, and short-term adjuncts--to examine whether adjunct faculty have different impacts on student academic outcomes than tenure-track and tenured faculty. We use two empirical strategies--a two-way fixed effects model and an instrumental variable approach--to examine how initial exposure to a field of study with different types of instructors influences both contemporaneous and subsequent course performance in both two- and four-year colleges, as well as the extent to which the estimated differences on student outcomes may be explainable by observable instructor academic and employment characteristics. Our results suggest that adjuncts have positive impacts on introductory course grades but negative impacts on subsequent course enrollment and performance. Such negative impacts are stronger among supplemental adjuncts hired temporarily than among adjuncts with long-term employment contracts with the college. The estimated differences among instructors can be largely explained by key instructor demographic and employment characteristics, including highest degree attained, whether employed full-time in the college, and whether had previous work experience in non-teaching positions.