Broadening Access, Maintaining Effectiveness: The Case of One Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Consortium Answering Obama's Calls for Community College Reform

• In Event: President Obama's Agenda for Community Colleges: Evidence of Organizational Change and Impact on Underserved Students

Abstract

Under President Obama’s administration, community colleges have come under increasing pressure to achieve two goals. The first is to increase the rate at which students who enroll in community colleges attain a credential. The second is to widen the doors of opportunity to student populations that are most in need of postsecondary education. Although the latter goal has been central to the mission of community colleges since their inception, there is an inherent tension between this aim and the current completion agenda. This phenomenon is particularly evident in the Department of Labor’s (DOL) Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College Career Training (TAACCCT) grant. Individual colleges and consortia funded through TAACCCT were required to set ambitious targets. However, TAACCCT was primarily aimed at increasing the college access of low-skilled adults who were most in need of retraining. The question central to the TAACCCT program is whether colleges were able to increase their students’ success rates and serve an even needier population simultaneously.
The purpose of this study is to present results from an evaluation of one TAACCCT initiative, the Health Professions Pathways (H2P) consortium made up of nine community colleges in five states. H2P seeks to revamp healthcare programs through the use of a variety of strategies, such as core curriculum, enhanced student support services, credit for prior learning, and contextualized developmental education. H2P is a particularly relevant case of community colleges attempting to meet the goals set out by President Obama given that healthcare is a sector with a critical shortage of skilled workers but is also one of the most selective, and challenging, fields of study at community colleges.
Through a mixed-method evaluation, an extensive amount of data has been collected on implementation of targeted strategies as well as student outcomes. This study utilizes a number of methods, including quasi-experimental designs such as propensity score matching (PSM) to estimate the effect of H2P on student outcomes, and also analyzes the extent to which the population of students enrolled in the targeted programs of study evolved with the introduction of H2P. The control group is drawn from a retrospective sample of healthcare students who enrolled in the colleges three years prior to the introduction of H2P. Results show that the raw rate of completion did not change substantially between the retrospective time period and the H2P timeframe. However, the population of students enrolled in the colleges did change appreciably, with a higher percentage of African-American, adult, and employed students, as well as those returning to college, found in the H2P sample. When statistically controlling for these changing demographics, H2P increased the estimated probability that students would earn a credential by as much as 19 percentage points. The results suggest community colleges are able to increase access to underserved students without decreasing completion. A second finding suggests using only unadjusted completion rates may provide misleading estimates on outcomes, particularly when colleges are experiencing changing demographics.

Author

• Matt Giani, The University of Texas - Austin