Encouraging Student Persistence: the LA College Promise
This spotlight is part of a series examining work presented at the 2025 Strategic Data Project Convening. The theme of the convening was “Now What?”—interrogating how to move forward amidst technological advance, ethical questions, and the shifting education landscape.
Going around the room, each participant cast their memory back to share one word that defined the first weeks of college. Almost universally, the words returned to the same theme: overwhelming, lost, confused, disoriented. Though their stories were unique, the emotions that marked their early college days were strikingly alike.
The team at Los Angeles Community College District had long known that the transition to college can be a very difficult and destabilizing period. So when LA Mayor Eric Garcetti announced the launch of the LA College Promise (LACP) in spring 2016— a program that guaranteed free community college tuition to first time Los Angeles students— the team jumped into action.
LACCD, the largest community college in the nation, has nine campuses and nine presidents. Suddenly, they were all operating together in a rare coordinated effort to build the LA College Promise success and completion program, which offers summer transition support, Chromebooks, financial assistance, academic counseling, priority enrollment, and near-peer success coaching to bridge advisers and students.
The many facets of the LACP provided new opportunities to engage and support students that had historically struggled to persist to a credential. But was it working? LACCD brought in the Leveraging Technology and Engaging Students (LTES) research team, comprised of researchers from the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and the EdPolicy Hub and Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California, to find out.
The research soon found that LACP students were more likely to complete a first year, enroll full time, and gain a credential within three years than non-LACP students, and they maintained their progress even when other students fell behind during the COVID-19 pandemic. The LACP was making a difference for the city's students.
Yet one metric remained stubborn: fall-to-fall persistence in the Promise program. Students were dropping to part-time enrollment, or failing to meet participation requirements, though 80% remained in the district.
In a randomized control trial of an enhanced coaching pilot, the LACCD team is testing the value of workshops on skills like resilience and asking for help and weekly text messages encouraging students to stay motivated and register for the next term.
This next phase of the work aims to break the siloes of student support that allow needs to fall through the cracks, helping students change plans, switch majors, build trusting advising relationships, and combat external pressures that discourage them from continuing their studies.
As the team at LACCD looks to the future, one thing is clear: student success isn’t just about removing financial barriers—it’s about meeting students where they are, listening to their needs, and responding with care, strategy, and persistence. As the work continues, the hope is that fewer students will use words like confused and overwhelmed to describe the start of their college journey—and instead, begin to say confident, supported, and ready. Because when a community commits to truly standing behind its students, the promise isn’t just in the name. It’s in the outcomes.
The team has published an initial analysis of the LACP—check it out here, alongside LTES’s other work on college enrollment.
LTES—a collaboration between the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University (CEPR, the Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD), and the EdPolicy Hub and Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California—was funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305X220018 to the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
The LTES team, from left to right: Deborah Harrington (Dean of Student Success for the Los Angeles Community College District), Joanna Zimring Towne (Faculty Coordinator for the LA College Promise), Elise Swanson (CEPR Associate Director of Research), Jon Fullerton (Executive Director of the USC Education Policy Hub), Rachel Worsham (CEPR Senior Research Manager)