The Promises and Pitfalls of Measuring Community College Quality

In this paper we explore the community college (institutional) effect on student outcomes in the nation’s largest public two-year higher education system—the California Community College system. We investigate whether there are significant differences in student outcomes across community college campuses after adjusting for observed student differences and potential unobserved determinates that drive selection. To do so, we leverage a unique administrative dataset that links community college students to their K–12 records in order to control for key student inputs. We find meaningful differences in student outcomes across California’s Community Colleges, after adjusting for differences in student inputs. We also compare college rankings based on unadjusted mean differences with college rankings adjusted for student inputs. Our results suggest that policymakers wishing to rank schools based on quality should adjust such rankings for differences in student-level inputs across campuses.