Abstract
Over the past decade, adult students have constituted between 24% and 36% of fall enrollment in the Tennessee community college system. However, many of these students have struggled to persist and complete a credential. Three-year graduation rates for adult students have held steady at approximately 23% for the last four years. Adults who complete a credential stand to realize significant benefits to their employment prospects and earnings, but too few adults persist to completion to experience these benefits. To address the challenges adult students face on their path to a college credential, we will partner with two colleges (Jackson State Community College and Northeast State Community College) to redesign the experience of adults in their first year of college, including students who are new to college and students who are returning to college after time away. The intervention includes two components: redesigned general education courses and success coaches who are embedded within those courses. We will offer stipends to five faculty members per year at each partner college to incorporate adult-friendly teaching strategies into the general education courses they teach. Half of the eligible adult students who enroll in these redesigned courses will be randomly assigned to coaching. Coaches will have a caseload of no more than 150 students, which is substantially lower than the average caseload of 569 students per relational advisor at Tennessee community colleges. Coaches will meet with students two times in each semester (either in person or virtually) and will reach out at least weekly via text message and email, with the goals of connecting students with campus resources, helping them identify majors and careers that are most relevant to their goals, and supporting their academic progress. For students enrolled in the redesigned courses, coaches will work closely with instructors to monitor the progress of their assigned students and proactively intervene as students encounter difficulties. Because we will estimate the impact of each component of the intervention separately as well as the two components together, the experiment will have three treatment arms: (1) coaching only; (2) course redesign only; and (3) coaching and course redesign. Students are eligible to participate in the intervention if they meet the following criteria: enrolled as a degree- or certificate-seeking student at Jackson State or Northeast State; graduated from high school more than five years ago; either in their first-ever semester of college or in their first semester back in college after a break of at least one semester (excluding summer); and not part of any special populations that will be excluded from the sample (i.e., students who have access to enhanced advising through another program on campus and students in prison education programs). We will provide coaching for five cohorts (i.e., students beginning in each of the fall and spring semesters between spring 2023 and spring 2025), and students will receive coaching for a full academic year. Spring 2023 will serve as a pilot of the intervention, and data from this semester will not be included in the experimental evaluation. For each cohort, we will randomize students into the treatment and control conditions after stratifying by college (i.e., site), student type (i.e., first-time or returning student), and enrollment in a redesigned course section. Randomization occurs at the individual level. Across the two years, we will assign up to 600 students to the two coaches at Jackson State and up to 900 students to the three coaches at Northeast State to maintain a caseload of no more than 150 students per coach in a year. Based on enrollment data from the most recent academic year and expected adult enrollment in the redesigned courses, we estimate that there will be approximately 650 students in the treatment arms and 416 students in the control group at Jackson State. We expect that there will be approximately 950 students in the treatment arms and 768 students in the control group at Northeast State. Our primary outcomes of interest are course success rates, semester-to-semester persistence, year-to-year persistence, and two-year completion rates. We will treat all other outcomes and subgroup analyses as exploratory.