Coaching for Completion: Final Report for Success Boston Coaching

Starting with the high school graduating Class of 2009, Success Boston has provided transition coaching to Boston Public Schools (BPS) high school graduates, many of whom are from groups traditionally underrepresented in college. In the first few years of Success Boston Coaching (SBC), the program served approximately 300 students per year. In 2015, under a "scale-up" effort supported in part by a Social Innovation Fund grant from the Corporation for National and Community Service, SBC expanded from serving several hundred Boston young adults in each high school graduating class to about 1,000 students per cohort. Beginning with the 2015 cohort, Success Boston also accorded more significant and intentional focus on the coaching of students at two-year colleges as well as on supporting students who are young men of color. The study examines how SBC was implemented, and what effects, if any, SBC has had on students' postsecondary success and completion. This longitudinal study follows five cohorts of students who initially enrolled in college each fall, from 2013 through 2017, immediately after graduating from high school. It looks at whether students who received SBC were more successful in the short-term and long-term in college than a group of similar peers who did not receive SBC. This report examines the effects of SBC on postsecondary completion for the five cohorts combined: the pre-scale-up cohorts (2013 and 2014) and the post-scale-up cohorts (2015, 2016, and 2017). In addition, to complement the 2021 report's focus on the pre-scale-up cohorts' completion, and because it is a common practice to examine how a program's effects change after the program is scaled up, this report also examines SBC's effects on the three post-scale-up cohorts' completion. Finally, as an exploratory analysis, the report also examines how SBC affects students' completion of different types of credentials, such as bachelor's degrees and associate degrees.