The Multiple Missions of Community College

U.S. community colleges are extremely diverse; these public schools provide vocational awards, the first 2 years of a 4-year university degree, adult basic education, specialized training for companies, coursework for industry credentials, and many offerings in between. In other words, community colleges have many different missions. They serve students who, on average, have less advantaged educational and socioeconomic backgrounds than students attending 4-year institutions, yet community colleges receive less funding per student, on average. Regarding remedial or developmental education, many studies estimating the effect of participating in traditional developmental education courses use regression discontinuity models to look at the population of students who barely fail placement exams, compared to those who barely pass. These studies find mixed results. Results are more promising for corequisite models where students take remedial classes alongside college-level classes. Many community college students state that their goal is to transfer to a 4-year school and complete a bachelor’s degree, but only roughly one quarter achieve this goal. Although state articulation agreements aim to simplify the process of transferring, descriptive analyses of these programs suggest that they have at best modest effects on transferring and completing a bachelor’s degree. Associate Degree for Transfer (ADT) programs aim to reduce the number of choices students face as they work through their community college courses. In the early 21st century, evaluations of these programs suggest that they raise bachelor’s degree receipt relative to students in majors or schools that do not offer ADTs, but more research is needed. Despite low persistence rates, particularly in academic programs at community colleges, nearly all the awards offered by these institutions lead to increases, often sizable, in labor-market outcomes. Broadly speaking, the biggest gains are for the program with the most coursework, an associate’s degree, which typically requires 2 years of full-time coursework. At the same time, stackable credentials and non-credit credentials, awards that can sometimes be completed in under a year, often lead to increases of more than 10% in earnings and over 4 percentage points in employment. In contrast, certificates have mixed impacts on labor-market outcomes, although the results for employment are more promising than those for earnings.