At least until the early 1980s, the most important measure of the quality of institutions of higher education had more to do with the inputs that went into the educational process than the outputs that came from that process. Thus, colleges were of high quality if they had a prestigious faculty, a highly selective student body, good libraries, research facilities, and such. Clearly some outputs were also important. Colleges were proud of their alumni who succeeded in business, medicine, and law. Today, all of these features are still associated with quality, but increasingly more emphasis is being put on measuring the outputs, or outcomes, of the educational process. Outcome measures may be concerned with student learning, counting the number of degrees awarded or measuring up to a variety of other standards of performance. One of the standard techniques used for measuring outcomes is cohort analysis. In measuring graduation rates, for instance, we might follow an entering student cohort for four or more years and then report on that cohort's retention and graduation rates. Such results are usually reported in the college catalog and to various state and accrediting agencies who are required to collect these measures. The cohort most commonly used for outcome analysis is the first-time, full-time student. This paper will argue that this cohort is not very meaningful for community colleges and tends to mask the true nature of their mission. Examples and data are taken from the State University of New York (SUNY) and from Broome Community College (BCC), which is a unit of the SUNY system and, we will argue, is not an atypical example. 42 Measuring Outcomes 001. Dellow and Romano
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