Here are three reports you should know about this month.

1. A new federal report, Working Before, During, and After Beginning at a Public 2-Year Institution: Labor Market Experiences of Community College Students, shows that in 2011–12, about 44 percent of students enrolled in a public, two-year college worked their first year of attendance. How did they fare? According to the report, 20 percent of beginning students who worked 20 hours or fewer while enrolled attained an associate degree by 2014. That’s compared with 10 percent of students who did not work while enrolled in their first year and 9 percent of students who worked full-time during their first year. And “those who had worked full time when first enrolled earned a higher median salary in their post-enrollment job than did their counterparts who had worked less or not at all when first enrolled,” according to the report’s authors.
2. Research from the UC Davis Health reveals that “medical school graduates who attended community college are more likely to select family medicine for their residency training and to be from groups traditionally underrepresented in medicine.” The results of this study lead the authors to recommend expanding medical school outreach and mentorship at the community-college level as a way to increase physician diversity and access to primary care. Why is this important? Because, though medical school diversity has increased, it hasn’t kept pace with the growing diversity of patients, according to a press release.
3. For students who started college in fall 2016 at two-year public institutions, the persistence rate was 62.2 percent, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center’s latest Snapshot Report. That’s down 0.5 percentage points from the prior year, but up 1.2 percentage points in comparison to the fall 2009 cohort. Students who enrolled full time had better persistence rates (70.6 percent) than those who enrolled part time (55.6 percent). When looking at all students who started college in fall 2016, nearly 74 percent persisted at any U.S. institution in fall 2017.