Description:

The Achieving Collegiate Excellence and Success (ACES) program is a collaboration between Montgomery County Public Schools, Montgomery College, and the Universities at Shady Grove to create a seamless pathway from high school to college completion; it targets students who are underrepresented in higher education, the first in their family to attend college, or both. As one of a series of reports about ACES, this document reports on the academic success of the first group of ACES students to attend Montgomery College.

There were many positive outcomes for the first group of ACES students at Montgomery College. Almost all of them enrolled in at least one college-credit course and were largely successful. They significantly out-performed a matched group of comparison students on several measures: enrollment in college-credit courses, mean grade point average, pass rate for college-credit courses, spring semester retention, and receipt of financial aid. However, almost all ACES students enrolled in at least one preparatory (i.e., non-college credit) course and were more likely do so than non-ACES students. With respect to the goal of graduation with an associate's degree, ACES students on average earned less than one quarter of the credits necessary in their first year of college. But they did earn significantly more credits than the comparison students.

File Name: FINAL Academic success of MC students in ACES 2014 2015.pdf (660KB PDF)