Community College Metrics & Benchmarking

Access to the Benchmarking Tool is limited to users who work at community colleges and have an affiliated college email.

Since 2010, the Aspen Institute College Excellence Program (Aspen) has, through the Aspen Prize, measured how effectively community colleges deliver high, improving, and equitable student outcomes. In this process, Aspen assesses student outcomes during college: Do students complete their credentials? Are they learning valuable skills along the way? 

While these are important questions, completing a credential is not the end of a community college’s responsibility for its students’ success. The overwhelming majority of students enter community college with the intention of improving their economic standing, either through completing a credential that prepares them to work or by transferring into (and completing) a bachelor’s degree program. For this reason, Aspen also assesses two indicators that, together, represent the ultimate measures of community college success: 1) whether students transfer to four-year institutions and complete a bachelor’s degree within six years of community college entry and 2) whether graduates earn a living wage after completing their community college credentials.

If a college is not achieving these outcomes for its students, then it has room for improvement. To guide colleges in their continuous improvement efforts, Aspen has developed a list of high-impact metrics across five broad categories: workforce outcomes, transfer/bachelor’s completion outcomes, completion outcomes, teaching and learning outcomes, and access to the college and its high-value programs. 

This list is not meant to reflect a complete set of metrics colleges should use. The metrics are also not meant to be adopted wholesale—college leaders will want to choose a limited number of metrics on which to focus their reform efforts. Finally, this list of metrics is not the only resource college leaders should consider. Users may also find value in other metric frameworks, including those used by Achieving the Dream, AACC’s Voluntary Framework of Accountability, the Institute for Higher Education Policy’s metrics framework, and the Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP).

While college leaders will find value in collecting data on all students, consistently disaggregating data whenever possible can reveal outcome disparities. This information is essential for colleges developing strong reform plans to improve and close disparities in student success.

1. Race/ethnicity
2. Gender
3. Family/Personal Income
4. Age
5. Parent/Dependent status
6. Attendance intensity
7. First-generation status
8. Veteran status

Students may identify with one or many of the above identities. College leaders should consider how these different identities intersect and pay close attention to these relationships and how they may influence each student’s experience.