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Student success is at the heart of both institutional effectiveness and the community college mission, yet measuring such success at community colleges is problematic. This chapter highlights three efforts to grapple with this problem-a multistate work group of system-and state-level policymakers to create an improved set of student success measures to gauge state and institutional performance; the development of benchmarking tools to improve racial/ethnic equity in college student outcomes and improve evaluation of institutional effectiveness in promoting student success; and an example of how one institution is leveraging state, regional, and national efforts to more effectively measure, and ultimately improve, student outcomes. Through these examples, we present the commonly used measures of student success, analyze their strengths and weaknesses, and discuss innovative measures that are being used to benchmark community colleges.

This chapter explores the changing nature of how students experience postsecondary education that results in a considerable amount of “swirl” between institutions. Although the traditional notion of “vertical” transfer from a community college to a university continues to be an important aspect of the community college mission, the varying patterns of mobility between institutions will have significant implications for students, the costs they incur, and their ultimate success.