Advisor-Financial Role Separation
RCTClinical Trial
Comprehensive postsecondary support bundles that combine tuition waivers, blocked scheduling, and campus counseling produce large completion gains, but their extreme per-student financial costs restrict widespread institutional adoption and scalability.
Picture this
Deploying multi-faceted support bundles is like providing commuters with a fully chauffeured luxury limousine service that includes paid toll passes and free meals; while the service guarantees arrival, the high cost per passenger limits the service to a tiny fraction of travelers, making targeted repair services a more scalable public transit solution.
What the evidence says
CUNY ASAP nearly doubled graduation rates (18 percentage point increase) at an additional cost of $16,284 per student ($42,065 total three-year program cost), whereas Stay the Course achieved a 31.5 percentage point female degree increase at $5,640 per student.
- Who was studied
- Comparative RCT evaluation data between CUNY ASAP (N = 896) and Stay the Course (N = 869) community college interventions.
- How
- Comparative cost-effectiveness analysis across multi-site randomized controlled trial evaluations in urban community colleges.
What to do
Compare multi-faceted intervention proposals against targeted case management alternatives using per-graduate cost metrics rather than focusing exclusively on overall effect sizes.
From the source
"The evaluation found that this three-year program nearly doubled graduation rates... It should be noted that this program is multi-faceted and extremely expensive, which raises questions about how readily such a program might be replicated in other settings."
Increasing Community College Completion Rates among Low-Income Students: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial Evaluation of a Case Management Intervention