Comprehensive Social Work Case Management
RCTClinical Trial
Student retention initiatives often assume uniform effectiveness across varying levels of baseline student preparation, failing to identify which specific academic risk tiers derive the highest marginal benefit from intensive non-academic case management.
Picture this
Offering case management to students across different academic preparation levels is like providing advanced flight coaching to student pilots; pilots who already possess basic flight mechanics benefit immensely from navigation coaching to reach their destination, whereas pilots whose engines are broken require basic mechanical repair before flight coaching can make a difference.
What the evidence says
Participants in the top third of baseline degree propensity achieved a 65.7 percentage point increase in six-semester college enrollment (TOT, p < 0.05) and a 41.9 percentage point increase in degree completion (TOT, p < 0.10), whereas lower propensity terciles exhibited no statistically significant gains.
- Who was studied
- N = 869 low-income students stratified into terciles based on baseline predicted probability (prognosis score) of earning a degree.
- How
- Repeated split sampling (RSS) methodology (Abadie et al., 2013) using logit prognosis scores across 1,000 split samples with 100 bootstrap iterations per split sample.
What to do
Target intensive case management resources toward low-income students who maintain baseline academic eligibility but face significant non-academic life disruption risks.
From the source
"Results for the subsamples indicate that STC is particularly effective for students with higher baseline propensity scores of success."
Increasing Community College Completion Rates among Low-Income Students: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial Evaluation of a Case Management Intervention