The Detroit Promise allows the city’s high school graduates to attend local colleges tuition-free. To that existing scholarship the Detroit Promise Path adds campus coaches, monthly financial support, enhanced summer engagement, and messages informed by behavioral science. Early findings from the first year are positive.
Interim Findings on Aid Like A Paycheck
This study examines whether an alternative approach to distributing financial aid — in biweekly payments instead of one or two lump sums — can improve outcomes for low-income community college students. After one semester, the policy reduced students’ debt and use of federal loans but showed little consistent evidence of academic effects.
Although most college students receive financial aid, many are left with unmet financial needs and may take on loans or drop out as a result. But promising innovations in financial aid could help students pay for college and accelerate their studies.
Forty percent of all entering college students and over half of entering community college students must take at least one remedial course. Fewer than half make it through developmental education. This two-page Looking Forward memo provides an overview of research evidence in four areas of developmental education reform.
While a college degree offers the opportunity for increased income, it alone does not guarantee students’ entry into the workforce. To facilitate this important transition, the Great Lakes Career Ready Internship Grant program, supported by the Great Lakes Higher Education Corporation & Affiliates (“Great Lakes”), is funding career-focused, paid internships for...
The Encouraging Additional Summer Enrollment ( EASE ) Project is a new initiative to improve community college persistence and completion in Ohio. The project will apply insights from behavioral science to design targeted messaging and financial incentives that encourage students to enroll in courses during the summer term.
In the U.S., higher education...
College Promise is the latest college-access movement in the United States. With more than 300 programs across the nation, College Promise is pushing forward national conversations about college access and affordability. College Promise programs typically cover college tuition and fees for students in a particular geographic area. Some programs help students from a...
Incremental Delivery of Financial Aid to Promote College Success
This infographic explains MDRC’s large-scale test of whether an innovative approach to distributing financial aid – through bi-weekly payments, like a paycheck, instead of one or two lump-sum payments – can improve academic outcomes for low-income college students.
This document compares two approaches to improving community college outcomes — CUNY ASAP, a specific program model, and guided pathways, a framework for institutional reform — and discusses how they might be integrated to improve structure, coherence, and support for students.
Postsecondary education has become a centerpiece strategy for improving America’s labor market. It is estimated that 60 percent of American jobs will require some form of postsecondary education by 2018, and those who have not earned a college degree are 55 percent more likely to be unemployed than those who have. As a result, stakeholders ranging from the White House...
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