Community colleges are intended to be gateways to careers or to four-year colleges offering bachelor’s degrees.

Unfortunately, they have very low graduation rates. Just 20 percent of full-time students seeking a degree get one within three years. That number rises to 35 percent after five years, but by then another 45 percent have given up completely and are no longer enrolled. With graduation rates that low, community colleges can be dead ends rather than gateways for students.....

.....But an initiative at the City University of New York shows enormous promise for improving graduation rates at community colleges. The program, Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP), nearly doubled the share of students graduating within three years (to 40 percent from 22 percent). ASAP also increased the share enrolling in a four-year college (to 25 percent from 17 percent), so it may also, in time, increase the share earning a bachelor’s degree.

We know ASAP worked because it was evaluated with a randomized trial, with the assistance of MDRC, a nonprofit research organization. (I am a member of MDRC’s Educational Studies board, a group of academic researchers that meets every few years to review the portfolio of MDRC’s education research. Since 2010, when I joined the board, I have received compensation totaling $1,000.)

Students who volunteered for the study were randomly assigned to either the ASAP program (the treatment group) or standard CUNY services (the control group). Because the groups were randomly defined, they were the same at baseline. Over the years, as the ASAP students received extra services, their outcomes diverged from those of the control group. This difference in outcomes between the treatment and control groups is the estimated effect of the ASAP program.....

.....Because the ASAP “treatment” was a package, we can’t tell which of these elements was most effective in helping students succeed. Many of these elements had been tested individually in a series of studies conducted by MDRC, but none of them achieved the striking results of ASAP.

The ASAP students were given a lot of attention. They met frequently with advisers: 38 times a year, compared with six times a year for non-ASAP students. Unlike typical CUNY advisers, who have a caseload of 600 to 1,500 students, ASAP advisers advised 60 to 80 students. The ASAP students also got more tutoring, attending an average of 34 sessions (compared with seven in the control group). Both the students and the counselors said the incentive of the MetroCard was particularly effective in getting students to the meetings.

This set of intensive services does not come cheap. MDRC estimates that ASAP increased per-student costs by 60 percent, or about $5,400 a year. But because graduation rates nearly doubled, the amount CUNY spent for each college degree actually dropped by more than 10 percent.....

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