This article asks whether small changes to community college courses and programs can help improve student outcomes. We use administrative data from the California Community College system, including millions of student records and detailed course-level information for most career-technical education programs in the state. We construct a summary measure of each program’s flexibility, incorporating many components of the availability and scheduling of its courses. We show considerable variation in this flexibility measure across programs and over time. An increase in a program’s flexibility is associated with increases in enrollment and completions, but not with changes in its completion rate.

本文询问社区大学课程和计划的微小变化是否有助于提高学生成绩。我们使用来自加州社区学院系统的管理数据，包括该州大多数职业技术教育项目的数百万学生记录和详细的课程级别信息。我们构建了每个课程灵活性的总结衡量标准，并结合了课程可用性和日程安排的许多组成部分。我们在不同程序和时间的这种灵活性度量方面表现出相当大的变化。计划灵活性的提高与入学率和完成率的增加有关，但与完成率的变化无关。