Abstract
Low first-year persistence rates at Tennessee community colleges pose challenges for the state's educational attainment and workforce development goals. Historically, only about 75% of first-time students at Tennessee community colleges persist beyond their first semester. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated these persistence challenges at community colleges, as first-semester persistence fell eight percentage points, from 77% for the 2019 cohort to 69% for the 2020 cohort. Persistence rates are lowest for academically underprepared students. Among underprepared students who were placed into corequisite learning support courses (i.e., remedial or developmental courses) for all three subject areas (i.e., math, reading, and writing) in fall 2020, only 55% persisted to the following semester (a 13 percentage point decrease from 2019 to 2020). To address these widening gaps in persistence between academically underprepared students and their college-ready peers, we will implement a high-dosage coaching intervention embedded into learning support courses at two pilot colleges (Jackson State Community College and Northeast State Community College). These 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 provide frequent, personalized, and in-depth outreach during students’ first year of enrollment. They will meet with students three times during their first 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 programs of study that are most relevant to their goals, and supporting their progress through learning support. Students are eligible to participate in the intervention if they meet the following criteria: first-time student, recent high school graduate, over age 18, placed into one or more learning support courses, and not receiving enhanced advising from another program on campus. We will provide coaching for two cohorts (i.e., students beginning in fall 2022 and fall 2023), and students will receive coaching during the fall and spring semesters of their first year. For each cohort, we will randomize students into a treatment group and a control group after stratifying by college (i.e., site) and number of learning support placements (i.e., placement into 1, 2, or 3 learning support courses). Randomization occurs at the individual level. We will select up to 450 students for treatment at Jackson and up to 300 students for treatment at Northeast to maintain a caseload of no more than 150 students per coach. The remaining students who meet the eligibility criteria will be assigned to the control group. Based on historic enrollment data, we expect that there will be approximately 300 students in the treatment group and 208 students in the control group at Jackson. We expect that there will be approximately 300 students in the treatment group and 345 students in the control group at Northeast. Our primary outcomes of interest are fall-to-spring persistence, fall-to-fall persistence, credit attainment in the first year, and college grade point average (GPA). We will treat all other outcomes and subgroup analyses as exploratory.