Over 40% of full time four-year college students fail to earn a bachelor’s degree within six years, and many never complete their education. Among other findings, this CALDER Center paper asserts that starting at a community college before transferring to a four-year institution could increase the probability of students completing ...
Community colleges are an essential component of America’s higher education system. This report focuses on the high costs of the low retention and completion rates that are far too typical of community colleges.
At 21, many foster youth “age out” of financial benefits and supports from the child welfare system—before they even finish college. Given the challenges they face, it’s not surprising that only 3 to 10 percent of them earn undergraduate degrees compared with 34 percent of young adults who weren’t in ...
Which practices foster college readiness for students, particularly English learners? This study interviewed students, teachers and administrators to determine what college readiness means to staff and how teachers help prepare students.
These case studies show how AIR analyzes data and develops tools to prepare students to be college and career ready—bridging the gap between research and practice.
This guide provides a review of research on higher education persistence indicators that can be used to predict whether a student will remain enrolled in college and complete a two- or four-year degree.
As prospective college students and their parents pore over the Department of Education’s College Navigator and College Scorecard, Andrew Gillen suggests in this blog that they pay close attention to the financial implications of their choice. Ensuring that college is affordable should be high on the list of policy priorities, ...
Parents, teachers, schools, districts, states, and especially students all want schools that prepare graduates to thrive in the 21st century. In this blog post, Anne Mishkind asks what it means to be "college and career ready."
In this blog post, AIR scholar Audrey Peek explores income-share agreements (ISAs), a private form of financial aid that offers cash for college now in return for a percentage of students’ future earnings over a set time. Peek contends ISAs are an innovative way to pay for college that might ...
Recent data shows that while students from low-income families began 9th grade with high aspirations of going to college, by junior year their expectations decline considerably. In this blog post, Sakiko Ikoma and Markus Broer argue that closing the enrollment gap between low-income students and their more affluent counterparts means ...