This report provides a comprehensive analysis of evidence from over two decades of research on interventions designed to increase college access and completion. Drawing on rigorous evaluations of diverse programs and approaches, we examine what is effective to help students successfully navigate the path to and through college.
Key findings:
- Interventions that provide comprehensive student support, like Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) intervention, demonstrate the strongest effects on college completion. However, their higher costs and implementation complexity make them challenging to sustain and scale.
- Traditional advising and coaching interventions often produce modest positive effects, and these programs can be cost-effective when well-implemented, though results vary substantially across settings.
- While information and reminders are generally insufficient to improve college access and completion on their own, these approaches can be valuable components of broader support strategies. And relatively low-touch access interventions focused on “getting the job done” can have moderate effects on enrollment at low cost.
- Programs that guide high school students toward higher-quality institutions show particular promise for improving long-term outcomes. However, this approach requires careful consideration of the capacity of those institutions to enroll more low-income students and potential displacement effects.
- The complexity of financial aid systems and college processes remains a significant barrier. While support programs can help students navigate these challenges, their effectiveness is limited by the underlying complexity.
- All of the approaches that produce meaningful impacts on college completion consistently run up against resource constraints. Providing support sufficient to produce even arguably middling completion rates probably costs more than is typically available in many community colleges and public four-year institutions.
We identified several unanswered questions and directions for further experimentation and research.
- What are the best ways to ensure students use program services for which they are eligible? Requirements and incentives to use advising, tutoring, and other support can be effective, but carrots add cost and participation requirements can become their own barriers to access or completion. Whether to provide incentives as flexible cash or something more tied to the college experience (like support for books or transportation) is also an open question.
- Considering the real resource constraints institutions and organizations face, additional research on how best to reduce the cost of providing effective student support services would be valuable, including work examining how to use a wide range of existing and emerging technologies effectively to support students.
- Complexity and lack of transparency have long been identified as major culprits impeding access and completion, but systemic reforms toward simplification have been difficult to achieve. Research on the structural barriers at the institutional and policy levels—and how they might productively be overcome—should be a high priority, even if it is difficult to implement strong causal designs.
- Stakeholders should look for ways to ensure students understand how they can finance a college education before they apply to colleges or even earlier. In some settings and for some students, timely, relevant, trustworthy information may be enough—though how to convey that information is still an open question. In some cases, changes to actual pricing policy would be needed to make college affordable and reduce uncertainty about costs.
- The potential for changes to student-faculty interactions, instructional practices, and curriculum to influence persistence and completion are underexplored outside of developmental education.
An extensive experimental literature provides useful guidance on how post-secondary institutions, college access and success organizations, and policymakers can best use their limited resources to support students. However, significantly increasing the number of students who find their way to and through college—and reducing disparities by race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and gender—will require a substantial investment. Given the high returns to education for individuals, the economy, and society, additional investment is warranted.
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Acknowledgements and disclosures
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