Career Decision Self-Efficacy Scale (CDSE)
Category: Pathways to and Through Postsecondary
Limited resources hinder community college completion. Even with strategies shown to improve outcomes, decisionmakers still ask: What does it cost? Can we afford it? I present the first comparative cost analyses of six student success initiatives: basic needs supports, college/career success courses, early alerts, embedded tutoring, retention/emergency aid, and first-year experience programming. Documenting annual, per-student, and cost-distribution patterns, I show costs range from $79,900 to $2.9 million per year, or $570 to over $1,320 per student. Higher perstudent costs do not signal more comprehensive services, campus budgets are poor proxies for actual cost, and many programs rely precariously on in-kind support. This work equips decisionmakers with practical insights and expands the use of economic evaluation in education.
Keywords
community college, cost analysis, economic evaluation, student success
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/26et-xh16
