Reports and Briefs

This literature review analyzes evidence on the effectiveness of career-oriented education in high schools and community colleges and discusses the factors that promote successful educational outcomes for students enrolled in career-technical programs. It finds the literature scarce on career-technical education (CTE) student success and suggests that further research would help us better understand and strengthen CTE student and program outcomes to better meet the needs of the workforce.

This report offers a framework, based on the research literature, for guiding educators in using available knowledge and tools to improve student outcomes. Using data for the California Community Colleges, the report illustrates the framework, which consists of milestones, or intermediate educational achievements that students reach along the path to degree completion, and indicators of success, or academic patterns students follow including remediation, gateway courses, and credit accumulation. The report shows how the framework can be used to diagnose where and why students fall off the path to success, to suggest appropriate interventions, and to improve accountability in community colleges.

This report is an excerpt of a report to the California State University done as part of its one-year planning grant from the Lumina Foundation’s Making Opportunity Affordable project. The report studies the 23-campus system’s efforts to improve graduation rates, analyzes systemwide data on student progress toward degrees, and makes recommendations for future steps.

This report reviews the research literature on student success to identify intermediate outcomes, sometimes called “milestones,” along the college pathway that give students momentum toward degree completion. It points to academic behaviors and patterns that can be tracked to identify where and why student progress stalls and how changes to policies and practices might increase degree completion.

his report tackles the difficult challenge of making transfer more comprehensible and less frustrating for California’s community college students. The study examines transfer policies of eight states, identifies some key dimensions of emerging policies, and offers recommendations for more student-centered transfer policies that would increase transfer success.

This research brief by Dr. Edward L. Lascher, Sacramento State Associate Dean, College of Social Sciences and Interdisciplinary Studies, is a summary of a critical review of the literature about retaining Latino and non-Latino college students. The brief highlights those findings that are best supported by earlier studies, emphasizes where further research is needed and offers recommendations.

This report draws attention to California’s looming shortage of educated workers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, as the demand for such workers increases and the state is producing too few graduates to meet the demand. The report offers recommendations to meet workforce needs and maintain the economic benefits that have resulted from the state’s historical strength in STEM employment.

This report examines issues of UC/CSU eligibility among under-represented minority high school students, with a specific focus on the growing Latino population. The report describes a simple model that can be used to estimate the impact of eligibility increases among Latinos. (click here to see the model).

This report examines seven states that share California’s high rates of growth and demographic change to see what California can learn about how to improve access to and success in postsecondary education.

(click here for Executive Summary)

This report analyzes the degree to which state finance policies for the community colleges align with state priorities – such as access, completion and affordability. It concludes that there is considerable misalignment; therefore, funds are not invested as well as they might be to accomplish state goals. Alternative approaches to finance are explored, and a new approach is suggested to replace traditional (and ineffective) performance funding with “investing in success.”