What If We Could Nearly Double the Graduation Rate of Community College Students With One Simple Idea?

While 80% of community college students say their goal is to earn an associate’s degree in a two-year program, only a third go on to graduate with a certificate or degree within six years. While community colleges offer flexibility and accessibility, they often don’t have ways to give extensive support and guidance to the students who really need it. Which is one reason more community colleges may want to follow the example of the ASAP program at the community colleges of the City University of New York system. The Accelerated Study in Associate Programs initiative turns a community college education into a comprehensive, full-time commitment. The program helps pay tuition, loans books to students, places students in bi-weekly advising, provides extra tutoring, and both supports students and holds them accountable from remedial classes all the way through to their degree. Most importantly, the initiative teaches students to navigate an academic institution and how to plot a course to success, which the program is doing for itself — it’s already well on its way to its goal of a 50% graduation rate.

Can Software Close the SAT Achievement Gap?

Dan Driscoll started City Football Club, a nonprofit soccer program for middle and high school students in Washington, DC. To play soccer, students had to participate in SAT tutoring and college counseling. Driscoll found that his tutoring techniques helped his students gain an average of 100 points on each of the three sections of the SAT. And while many of his students were heading to college, he wanted to find a way to give the same opportunity to other students. So he started Prepify, a cloud-based service that teaches students to take the SAT and ACT. The program adapts to students’ progress—for example, if a student misses a question, an easier version of a similar question will pop up next—and could close the gap in test scores between low-income students and their affluent peers. Prepify is a for-profit company, and Driscoll plans to reinvest all profits back into the software to create tools like a progress dashboard to connect low-income students with top universities.
MORE: The Bay Area groups that are trying to close the STEM gap