Report roundup
By AACC 21st Century Center Staff
December 15, 2016
A monthly roundup of reports of interest to the community college sector.
Here are three reports you should know about this month.
- The U.S. Department of Education has released a practice guide for helping students taking developmental education courses. It provides interventions aimed at improving students’ progress through developmental education, persistence, academic achievement and degree attainment. Recommendations include using multiple measures to assess college readiness and place students, and redesigning courses so they’re compressed.
- A new report by the National Bureau of Economic Research indicates that the American dream may be fading. Researchers looked at absolute income mobility and found that only 50 percent of people born in the 1980s are making more money than their parents. That’s staggering considering that a child born in 1940 had a 92-percent chance of making more money than his or her parents. What’s the cause? The researchers say it’s “driven by the more unequal distribution of economic growth in recent decades rather than the slowdown in GDP growth rates. In this sense, the rise in inequality and the decline in absolute mobility are closely linked.”
- One-stop services help students persist in their education, according to a new study by the RAND Corporation. Community college students participating in the Single Stop U.S.A. Community College Initiative were at least 3 percentage points more likely to persist into their second year of college compared to similar students who did not use the services. RAND examined the participation of four community college systems in the initiative, which helps low-income communities by connecting individuals to public benefits and other institutional and community resources in an effort to address nonacademic barriers to college completion. Students got help with applications for public benefit programs and other wraparound services all in a single location on campus.
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