By Laurel White
The most expensive programs aimed at supporting graduation rates at community colleges don’t necessarily serve the most students, according to a new working paper from a UW–Madison faculty member.
The working paper, published by Annenberg Institute at Brown University, analyzed annual costs of six common strategies for supporting community college student success: basic needs supports, college success and career exploration courses, early alert systems, embedded tutoring, retention- and emergency-based financial aid programs, and first-year experience programming. It found the programs vary widely in overall cost and cost per student.
Taylor Odle, an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies, authored the working paper. He says the analysis could be a helpful guide for policymakers as they work to identify the most savvy investments for advancing student success.
“These insights will hopefully help decision-makers identify what works — and at what cost,” Odle says. “It greatly expands and builds upon a much-needed area of study: cost studies in higher education.”
The paper offers a first set of comparative cost analyses of the most common community college success initiatives. Odle used data from the Paving the Way to Equitable, Adequate, and Effective Community College Funding project at the Community College Research Center to study programs and costs at six colleges from three states: California, Ohio, and Texas.
The analysis found a wide range in annual cost for the programs, spanning from roughly $79,900 per year to more than $2.9 million — and from as little as $570 per student to more than $1,320. The number of students served by each initiative ranged from 140 to more than 3,160.
“This variation in resources and capacity underscores the need for institutions to carefully consider program design and scale to ensure cost-efficiency while maintaining the effectiveness of these interventions,” Odle says.
Odle argues continued study of cost and effect of these programs is essential to facilitating informed decision making by funders including campus leaders, policymakers, and foundations.
Broadly, Odle’s research uses quantitative methods and data science techniques to study issues concerning the economics of education and education policy with a specific focus on college access and success, including college admissions practices, financial aid, and college advising and coaching. He is also a faculty affiliate in Data Science, the Institute for Research on Poverty, the Institute for Diversity Science, and the Interdisciplinary Training Program in Education Sciences.
Another recent publication from Odle shed light on funding vulnerability for tuition promise programs. Earlier this year, Odle also launched a groundbreaking study of automatic college admission in Tennessee. The study of roughly 60,000 high school seniors is one of the largest education research studies of the century.
Read the full working paper, “Comparative Cost Analyses of Community College Student Success Initiatives,” here. You can also access the Policy and Practice summary of the paper here.