UC Davis

Community colleges have been hailed as a ``cornerstone of American higher education," and act as an important access point to post-secondary education for a wide range of students, particularly socioeconomically disadvantaged students and underrepresented minorities. However, community colleges have also been criticized for poor completion outcomes, leading to the implementation of policies meant to bolster academic success. This dissertation focuses on how various policies, either directly or indirectly, affect community college student success, and whether these policies achieved its intended goals.

Chapter 1 studies how the removal of remedial education policies affects academic outcomes for students along a continuous range of college readiness. In this chapter, I merge two rich, detailed administrative datasets to show that remedial education, a policy meant to support underprepared students, actually impeded community college students' academic progress. In fact, I find that many students who would have been placed into remedial education are able to pass transfer-level courses after the remedial education policies were removed. In addition, students attempt more transfer-level coursework, which is necessary to accomplish long-run goals, such as transfer or degree receipt. These positive effects decline, but are still present, even for students who were expected to have benefited most from remedial education.

Chapter 2 examines the indirect effects of changes in the minimum wage in California on students' decisions to enroll in postsecondary institutions. In this chapter, my co-authors and I find that increases in minimum wages above the state minimum wage in different cities have small, positive effects on overall college enrollment. However, underlying this effect is a significant shift in student composition across college sector and quality. Lower performing, economically disadvantaged, and traditionally underrepresented students increase enrollment at community colleges. Meanwhile, higher performing students substitute their enrollment from community colleges into four year public institutions. Results examining unit accumulation for community college students provide evidence that increases in minimum wage alleviate financial constraints.

Finally, Chapter 3 investigates the effects of financial aid tied to academic conditions, such as full-time enrollment, on community college student outcomes. In this chapter, my co-authors and I find that community college students do not change their course-taking behavior to take advantage of generous increases in financial aid. Students do not seem to learn about these conditions even after receiving the grant, as there are null effects of grant receipt in the following semester, suggesting a deeper lack of awareness regarding the details of their financial aid package. These results have important implications regarding how to structure financial aid policies efficiently.