There are two critical things to know about community colleges.

The first is that they could be the nation’s most powerful tools to improve the opportunities of less privileged Americans, giving them a shot at harnessing a fast-changing job market and building a more equitable, inclusive society for all of us. The second is that, at this job, they have largely failed.....

......Community college students may not be the poorest of the poor, but they mostly come from stressed backgrounds in the bottom half of the income distribution, and they often lack the money or social support networks to help them through school. Most are not truly prepared for college, requiring remedial courses in math or English before they receive their first higher education credit......

.....But giving up on community colleges would be even worse, because some promising experiments point the way to a more successful path.

Take New York. A few years ago, the City University of New York began Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, which covered any tuition not already provided by financial aid. It offered students free textbooks and MetroCards for the subway.

Crucially, it offered intense tutoring: The program’s advisers had a caseload of 60 to 80 students, about one-tenth of that of a typical community college adviser. Students had to commit to a full-time program and sign up for early developmental courses needed to get up to speed. The college steered students into blocks of courses and pressed them to graduate with associates’ degrees within three years.

The results were impressive. MDRC, a nonprofit organization that evaluates social policies, found that the accelerated study program roughly doubled the three-year graduation rate among the most disadvantaged students, those who initially needed remediation classes.

The program is not cheap; it costs 30 to 35 percent more a student. But because of the higher graduation rate, the cost per graduate was actually lower. And that, said Gordon Berlin, president of MDRC, is the metric that matters.

The White House knows about this accelerated program and plans to demand a similar commitment. It is structuring the federal aid in a way that, it hopes, will push states and colleges to invest in empirically tested strategies to improve retention and graduation rates. And it is encouraging them to create curriculums that prepare students either for a four-year college transfer or for an in-demand job.....

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