Investigating Why Academically Successful Community College Students Leave College without a Degree

These files contain instructions for accessing data and scripts to replicate the analyses for "Investigating Why Academically Successful Community College Students Leave College without a Degree"<br><br>The abstract for the paper is found below:<br><br>Even though a postsecondary degree can offer economic, social, and civic benefits, many community college students leave without earning a degree—including some who have performed well academically and made substantial progress toward graduation. To better understand the factors contributing to early exit, we surveyed a number of former students in a large community college system. We improve the generalizability of the survey responses through multilevel regression with poststratification (MRP), which we use to reweight the responses to better represent the population in our original survey frame. We find that tuition and fees, living expenses, and no longer being eligible for financial aid are the factors contributing to early exit for the largest share of students. We also find variation in both financial and non-financial factors across subgroups, suggesting that targeted supports may be useful in helping students persist or return to college and complete their degree.