The Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) is a comprehensive suite of supports meant to help community college students persist in school and complete a degree in three years or less. These include obvious things, such as tuition and transportation assistance, and less-obvious—but no less necessary—things, such as work- and family-friendly class schedules, priority registration, and intensive advising from dedicated counselors. It began in the City University of New York (CUNY) system in 2007 and was imported into Ohio—at the Cincinnati State, Cuyahoga, and Lorain County community colleges—beginning in 2015. All along the way, implementation partner MDRC has also been tracking outcomes for Ohio students via a randomized controlled trial.
I have reviewed two of MDRC’s prior reports: A look at the program’s structure and first two years of data, and their further analysis based on a third year of data. They found, in short, that the treatment group outperformed the control group in all measured outcomes, which include persistence in school, persistence of full-time enrollment, credit accumulation, and college graduation. All program effects were large, significant, and increased throughout the study period. The Ohio version of the program also turned out to be more efficient in terms of staffing needs and cost requirements than the CUNY one.
Even though the program was discontinued in 2020 at two of the three Ohio sites due to withdrawal of financial support, MDRC researchers continued to follow the original treatment and control groups for a further three years. The most recent report on their progress was released last month. The new results were similar to those previously reported. After six years, 44 percent of treatment students had earned a degree of any kind, compared with 29 percent of control students. This included both associate and bachelor’s degrees. Forty-two percent of treatment students earned an associate degree over six years, compared with 26 percent of control group students, and 14 percent of treatment students earned a bachelor’s degree, compared with 9 percent of their control group peers.
New to this report, the researchers also found that ASAP participation boosted individuals’ earnings. In the sixth year of follow-up, which occurred during the pandemic, program participants’ average earnings (across full-time and part-time workers, as well as nonworkers) were $19,573, an 11 percent increase over the control group earnings of $17,625. And because program and control group employment rates were the same, they believe that the effect on earnings is directly attributable to treatment group students securing higher-paying jobs than their peers.
They speculate that the positive impact of ASAP in regard to earnings comes via two separate but interconnected mechanisms. The first is, perhaps obviously, degree completion. Students who were better prepared for community college at the start—those who entered without the need for remedial courses—saw the highest completion rates and the largest salary boosts. But to the extent that persistence is also enhanced by the ASAP supports, those treatment students who needed remedial courses at the start were less likely to drop out and moved on to earning credits faster than their control group peers. They, too, saw their earnings outpace those of the control group, even if they didn’t reach the same levels as those ASAP students who were more prepared for college.
As with previous analyses, the primary takeaway here is that the ASAP program improves outcomes for community college students, but that the overall outcomes for the universe of community college students are still not stellar. The amount of earned credits and degree completion numbers were still pretty low overall: Less than half of students in the treatment group have earned any type of degree after six years. Ditto for the earnings data. $19,500 per year is higher than $17,600, but if that is the highest level that successful community college students can hope for after six years, there are clearly more lucrative pathways available.
The vast majority of treatment and control group students have either completed or stopped attending college after six years, likely solidifying the college-centric impacts of the ASAP program firmly as “decently positive.” A version of the program continues, self-funded, at Cincinnati State Community College, although new data is not being added to the longitudinal study. But that doesn’t mean that MDRC and their partners are done tallying the postsecondary impacts of their original student support efforts. Join us back here in two years for more!
SOURCE: Colin Hill, Colleen Sommo, Kayla Warner, “From Degrees to Dollars: Six-Year Findings from the ASAP Ohio Demonstration,” MDRC (April 2023).
