California Community Colleges Release Statewide ‘Student Success Scorecard’

The California Community Colleges released a “Student Success Scorecard” on Tuesday to allow students and their families to compare colleges in the system based on student data.

The scorecard—a recommendation of the system’s Student Success Task Force—provides completion and persistence rates, as well as data on how effectively colleges move students through remedial and career-technical courses on each of the system’s 112 campuses. Each measure is broken down by race, ethnicity, gender, and age. Students and families can also track transfer rates and “momentum points,” such as the percentage of students who complete 30 units—a milestone that is considered to be the halfway mark to transferring to a four-year institution.

The scorecard compares each college against its own past performance from the Accountability Reporting for Community Colleges, a set of statewide data collected and published by the system chancellor’s office.

Those performance gauges make the system more transparent and accountable, and are designed to help more students reach their educational goals, said the chancellor, Brice W. Harris, in a written statement.

The scorecard should also help the colleges, Mr. Harris said. For the first time, he said, the system’s colleges will have clear data on student success that will help them “focus on closing performance gaps.”

President Obama has called for five million more associate-degree holders by 2020, and the development of the scorecard is one step in a series taken by the California Community Colleges’ Board of Governors to help achieve that goal, according to Manuel Baca, president of the board.

“The scorecard will help us see what is working in California, and what needs improvement,” Mr. Baca said in a written statement. “This will lead to increased student success, and ultimately it will help the nation reach its ambitious, yet certainly attainable, goal.”