District Digest: Community Colleges: Beyond the Numbers

Stephanie Norris and Sonya Ravindranath Waddell

Econ Focus, 2026, vol. 26, issue Q3, 24-28

Abstract: There is enduring demand for postsecondary education that can provide the diverse range of skills, knowledge, and experience required for the jobs of today. For some postsecondary institutions, traditional metrics designed around the four-year degree model (i.e., graduation rates for first-time, full-time, degree-seeking students) are reasonable measures of how successfully they provide that training. For other institutions, such as community colleges, metrics like the Richmond Fed's Survey of Community College Outcomes are designed to more accurately measure what they do and who they serve. Yet despite their strengths, neither of these measures can capture students' ultimate labor market outcomes, and both also fail to capture other aspects of how colleges, and in particular community colleges, serve their regions and the broader labor market.

Keywords: Education; Workforce Development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.richmondfed.org/-/media/RichmondFedOrg ... /district_digest.pdf Journal Article (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedrrf:103658

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Econ Focus from Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Pascasio ().