Early Evidence for a Multisite RCT to Improve College Re-Enrollment and Completion for Stopped-Out Students

• In Event: Re-engaging at Scale: How State and Institutional Policies Impact Re-enrollment and Success for Adult Learners

Abstract

Community colleges educate a disproportionate share of the nation’s low-income, first-generation, and racially minoritized students, who face both academic and nonacademic barriers to success (Ma & Baum, 2016; Shapiro et al., 2017). Although community colleges provide millions of students with the opportunity to pursue higher education at a low cost, most do not complete a credential. In fact, only 31 percent of first-time community college students earn a degree or certificate within three years (IPEDS Trend Generator, 2021). Among community college non-completers, roughly 20 percent had already made at least two years’ worth of academic progress toward their degree before exiting early without a credential. Those previously successful non-completers who are no longer enrolled in college but very close to graduation have been identified in descriptive research as a promising subgroup of students to target when seeking to improve community college completions across the United States (Shapiro et al., 2019). Understanding how to re-engage, re-enroll, and graduate former students who made considerable progress toward their degree is vital to supporting students in achieving their academic and economic goals. In addition, re-engaging and re-enrolling previously successful students who have left could also provide significant return on investment for colleges and communities seeking to improve graduation rates and bolster local workforces. We partnered with four high-enrollment community colleges and employed a randomized controlled trial (RCT) design to examine the effectiveness, implementation, and cost of the Re-Enrollment And Completion Team (REACT) intervention. The REACT intervention adapts a variety of evidence-based student-centered components designed to increase re-enrollment, persistence, and completion among community college stop-outs, with a focus on advancing prior literature by prioritizing sustained financial supports and student services (Ortagus et al., 2021, 2025).
This intervention is comprised of three components targeted toward students who pursued an associate degree but left college with 15 or fewer credits remaining:
• Tuition waivers for up to 15 credit hours if students re-enroll, offered for up to five semesters (including summer semesters),
• Student support services including proactive, case management-style advising and personalized degree mapping from an advisor dedicated to these returning students throughout the five-semester program period, and
• Multimodal messaging that is sustained over the program period to offer tuition waivers, encourage re-enrollment in college, and encourage take-up of ongoing support services.
Partner colleges launched the intervention in Summer 2025. At APPAM, we will present early findings pertaining to the efficacy of the REACT intervention. After analyzing two semesters of data, we have found that the REACT intervention has been an effective mechanism to induce re-enrollment among stopped-out community colleges students. More specifically, the REACT intervention had a statistically significant impact on reenrollment rates (9.5 percentage points). Given that the control group re-enrollment rate was 11.2 percent and the REACT group was 20.7 percent, the REACT intervention has nearly doubled re-enrollment rates at partner colleges.

Authors

• Colleen Sommo, MDRC
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Justin Ortagus, The University of Texas at Austin
  Presenting Author