Developing a Comprehensive Community College Student Success Metric

Session Abstract: Community colleges serve diverse populations of students, including part-time and full-time, adult and traditional age, and credit and noncredit. Yet, despite this, success metrics like graduation and transfer rates have focused only on select students, such as those who are full-time, first time in college, or those who earn awards. In this session, we will describe Dallas College’s efforts to develop a more comprehensive student success metric that encompasses the full range of student types and functions that it and other community colleges serve. We will describe how we joined the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond’s Survey of Community College Outcomes as a pilot participant for Texas, using its student success rate—which counts awards, transfer, and persistence as successful outcomes—to inform our own approach. We will discuss how other community colleges can better tell the stories of how their students achieve success in myriad ways by adopting or developing similar metrics.

Keywords: Community College, Student Success, Institutional Effectiveness