Round 1 Eligibility Model

Round One of the Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence process is designed to select 150+
public institutions that primarily award sub-baccalaureate credentials (out of 976 potential candidate
institutions) as eligible to apply for the Round Two selection process. The model was developed by the
National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS), in consultation with the Aspen
Prize’s Data and Metrics Advisory Panel (DMAP), and uses publicly available data from the National
Center for Education Statistics’ Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and the U.S.
Census Bureau. For the 160+ community colleges that award bachelor’s degrees and therefore report to
IPEDS as a four-year institution, Aspen administered a separate collection for these institutions to send
data using the same IPEDS definitions for institutions that report as a two-year college.
This document provides details of the analytic model developed to determine the 150+ institutions
eligible to apply for the Round Two selection process. Specific calculations for each metric in the model
are available in the appendix. The model is based on institutional performance in three general areas:
(1) retention, completion, and transfer, (2) improvement in performance over time, and (3) equity,
defined as performance outcomes for underrepresented students of color and low-income students.
Subject to modifications described in this document, each of these general categories was equally
weighted in the baseline model, with each accounting for one-third of the overall score.