Colleen Sommo

The research team will examine the 10-year impact of the City University of New York's (CUNY) Accelerated Studies in Associate Programs (ASAP) on education and labor market outcomes. CUNY ASAP is a 3-year program, designed and implemented by CUNY, that provides comprehensive supports including student support services, financial supports, and structured pathways. Since its inception in 2007, ASAP has served more than 88,000 students at CUNY, has been replicated across 7 states, and is widely...

In this project researchers will examine the effectiveness, implementation, and cost of the Re-Enrollment and Completion Team (REACT) program. This program draws on prior research regarding the components of interventions that promote persistence and degree completion among community college students and applies this research base to "near completers," namely students who have stopped out of college while being very close to completing an associate degree. The REACT program includes these ke...

This project will evaluate the SUCCESS intervention, which provides evidence-based, mutually reinforcing support services to help community college students stay on track through graduation at an affordable cost for colleges. The intervention design seeks to address two problems that have emerged in the postsecondary research literature: (1) very few interventions have causal evidence of substantially increasing graduation rates at community colleges; and (2) the few interventions with such ...

In this project, the research team will assess whether the City University of New York's (CUNY's) Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) intervention causes more college students to complete degrees, measured at seven years after initial college enrollment. This is a follow-up study to a previous efficacy study conducted by MDRC and funded by the New York City Center for Economic Opportunity. Because the ASAP intervention includes a comprehensive set of supports over a long (three-ye...

The project will extend an ongoing randomized control trial, known as the Performance-Based Scholarship (PBS) Demonstration that is evaluating the impacts of incentive scholarships on postsecondary outcomes for low-income college students. The PBS Demonstration began in 2008 and has recruited over 10,000 students across four states. Funded by other sources, the PBS Demonstration tracks college students' academic outcomes for up to two years after random assignment. This project will further ...

Community colleges serve as an important doorway to higher education for a growing number of minority and low-income students, working adults, parents, and first-generation college students. A large number of such students who enter with the goal of completing a college degree are not successful. To address this problem, a number of innovative programs have been developed to support entering community college students at-risk for dropping out. This project will evaluate the long-term educat...