The Economics of Community Colleges

April 6–7, 2028 — Cambridge, MA

Community colleges serve as the entry point to postsecondary education for millions of Americans, including disproportionate shares of racial minority, low-income, and first-generation college students, as well as large numbers of working adults, part-time students, and those returning to formal education later in life. Given these varied backgrounds and circumstances, students arrive at community colleges with wide-ranging goals, from earning associate degrees and certificates, to gaining job-specific skills or licenses, to transferring to four-year institutions. Yet many students never reach these goals. Within six years of enrolling, fewer than half have earned a credential of any kind, and although nearly 80 percent say they intend to earn a bachelor’s degree, fewer than one in five have.

This gap between intention and attainment has prompted a surge of policymaking aimed at improving outcomes for community college students. States and colleges have tested a range of interventions, including transfer and articulation agreements, financial aid reforms and free college programs, performance-based funding formulas, corequisite and developmental education reform, dual enrollment partnerships with high schools, training partnerships with local employers, and the expansion of new curricular pathways, such as the growth of community college baccalaureate programs. The breadth of this experimentation gives researchers a unique opportunity to learn how community colleges can best support students’ educational aspirations and improve their economic outcomes. 

To promote such research, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), with the generous support of Ascendium Education Philanthropy, will convene a research conference on April 6–7, 2028, in Cambridge, MA. Kalena Cortes (Texas A&M University), Riley Acton (Bowdoin College), Lois Miller (University of South Carolina), Camila Morales (University of Texas at Dallas), and Julia Turner (Northwestern University) will serve as organizers. The conference will bring together economists, sociologists, political scientists, and policy scholars to evaluate a range of efforts designed to improve the outcomes of students who enroll at community colleges. 

The organizers welcome research addressing, but not limited to, the following topics:

  • Statewide and system-level transfer and articulation policies, including bilateral agreements, common course numbering, reverse transfer, and the credit loss implications of transfer.
  • The financing of community colleges and their students, including state funding formulas, promise programs, federal aid design, and institutional cost structures that shape college offerings.
  • Dual enrollment, early college partnerships, and other high-school-to-college pathways that typically involve community colleges.
  • Work-based learning, apprenticeship, and CTE pathways that run through community colleges, and how the extension of federal aid to short-term programs may shape college offerings and enrollment.
  • The labor market returns to community college credentials including, but not limited to, certificates and other sub-baccalaureate credentials, associate degrees, community college baccalaureates, stackable credentials, and online pathways.
  • The effects of institutional policy choices, such as advising and guided pathways, corequisite and developmental education reform, course scheduling and modality, and basic needs and wraparound supports, on student outcomes. 
  • The emergence of reduced-credit and accelerated bachelor’s degree pathways in the four-year sector, including their implications for community college students and transfer pathways.
  • The geography and market structure of this sector, including the challenges facing rural colleges and students in education deserts, closures and consolidation, and competition from online and for-profit providers.

In addition to causal evaluations, the organizers welcome rigorous descriptive work and mixed methods research that combines quantitative and qualitative approaches, particularly in areas where basic facts about programs, enrollments, student experiences, and outcomes remain poorly documented. Submissions from scholars who are early in their careers and who are not NBER affiliates are especially encouraged. In keeping with NBER guidelines, papers may not offer policy recommendations or normative judgments about policies but may report analytic results on the effects of policies.

Full papers or extended abstracts are invited for submission to the conference organizers by 11:59pm ET on December 10, 2026. Extended abstracts should explain clearly what the project will study, and what data will be used. Papers that have been accepted for publication or that are expected to be published by Spring 2028 are not eligible for consideration. Please upload papers or extended abstracts via the following link:

Submit Paper

Decisions about which papers will be included on the program will be made by January 2027. Authors of selected papers will join an onboarding Zoom call in February 2027 to review expectations and logistics. The conference itself will take place in April 2028. The organizers plan to publish the papers from the conference, along with discussant remarks, as an edited volume with the University of Chicago Press.

The NBER will cover travel costs to the convening for one author per paper, subject to NBER travel reimbursement regulations, and additional authors are welcome to attend at their own expense. Questions about the conference may be addressed to confer@nber.org.