Increasing Community College Completion Rates Among Low-Income Students: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial Evaluation of a Case-Management Intervention

Community college completion rates are low, especially among low-income students. The existing policy and research attention has primarily focused on academic and financial challenges, but there is ample reason to think that non-academic obstacles might be key drivers of dropout rates for low-income students. This study focuses on the role of “life barriers” and investigates the effectiveness of intensive case-management services for low-income community college students. We evaluate the impact of the Stay the Course (STC) intensive case-management program through a multi-armed randomized controlled trial evaluation conducted between 2013 and 2016 in Fort Worth, Texas. Analysis of administrative records indicates that STC significantly increased persistence and degree completion for women; estimates for the full sample are imprecise. The statistically significant estimates for women imply that STC tripled associate's degree receipt by 31.5 percentage points. We find no difference in outcomes between students in an emergency financial assistance (EFA) only treatment arm and the control group. Given program costs of $4,343 per person, the implied cost per additional associate's degree is $27,140. This study complements existing literature on financial and informational interventions designed to increase completion rates and is most closely related to the smaller literature examining coaching and mentoring interventions.     

The hegemonic work of automated election technology in the Philippines

This article addresses the political role of information technology in the Philippines. It uses a theoretical framework inspired by Antonio Gramsci to examine the discourse surrounding automated elections in two major daily papers, the Philippine Daily Inquirer and Business World Philippines. It argues that this discourse strengthens current conceptions of the development process by appealing to the interests not only of the dominant fraction of capital in the country today, but also to the middle class. Such operations are essential for the creation of an historic bloc capable of exercising hegemony.     

Representatives of the public? Public opinion and interest group activity

Although scholars have long speculated about how organised interests link the public to decision makers, there has actually been little empirical research on this important element of democratic theory. This important gap in the literature is addressed in this article by examining, in addition to other supply‐side and demand‐side factors, whether groups mobilise on issues in policy areas that are regarded as salient by the public. Based on an analysis of 4,501 contributions in 142 European Commission online consultations, it is found that organised interests potentially can act as a transmission belt between the public and decision makers. Although the results vary to some degree by issues, higher rates of mobilisation are found on those issues that fall within policy areas that are regarded as salient by the general public and those with consequences for budgetary spending.     

The effect of prison gang membership on recidivism

Purpose

How does prison gang membership affect recidivism? In this paper, we use a unique dataset of all releasees from prisons operated by the Illinois Department of Corrections during the month of November 2000, which includes demographic information and data on gang participation. We attempt to control for confounding factors that are traditionally associated with both prison gang membership and rearrest.

Methods

We develop a potential-outcomes framework and describe the conditions under which a counterfactual can be estimated when gang membership is not randomly assigned. We combine regression analysis with Coarsened Exact Matching, which has several advantages over the more popular propensity score matching, to estimate the effect of gang membership on recidivism.

Results

Prison gang membership results in a six percentage point increase in recidivism.

Conclusions

Despite the strengths of the data, unobserved heterogeneity among inmates could still bias estimates. However, there are probably important subtleties to the gang participation decision such that experimental or quasi-experimental data are unlikely to increase our understanding of the relationship between gang-membership and post-release outcomes. We recommend incorporating ethnography with survey data collection, because ethnographers are able to document otherwise unobservable contextual information concerning the selection process which could be used to identify causal relationships.