Proof Points: Pricey community college program passes another test

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By Jill Barshay

Helping low-income students complete a community college degree isn’t easy or cheap. A multifaceted program that originated in New York City combines a bit of everything: advising, counseling, tutoring and a lot of financial aid. After the Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) passed a rigorous randomized control trial in New York, a similar version was tested in three Ohio community colleges beginning in 2015. The three-year results were published earlier this year and the treated students did well. But two of the three Ohio colleges have discontinued the effective program because of high costs.

(The evaluation and the Ohio program were partly supported by several philanthropies that are also among the many funders of The Hechinger Report: Arnold Ventures, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the ECMC Foundation, the Joyce Foundation and the Lumina Foundation.)

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Key Findings

35 percent of students in the Ohio program succeeded in getting a two-year associate degree within three years, nearly double the graduation rate of 19 percent for untreated students who only had access to the usual services on campus. This is statistically similar to the result achieved in New York.
Ohio’s students in this experiment were older, more likely to be parents themselves, and two-thirds were working 30 hours a week.
In Ohio, the cost of the program ran more than $8,000 per student. That doesn’t count most of the free tuition, which is largely footed by separate federal and state education grants for low-income students. The state of Ohio pays colleges for each degree that students complete but even with this performance funding system, the program still costs colleges $4,500 per student to operate