Before recommending a single tool, we answer the prior question: why do students stop? The reasons are rarely academic. This evidence base sets out the national data on non-persistence alongside GCC’s own documented barriers, and it all points one way: students leave when they are not connected to the support that already exists. (The baseline of who uses each service right now lives in Initiative 1, counted so we can prove the lift later.)
This is among the most replicated findings in higher education research: students who feel connected to their institution and supported by its services are significantly more likely to persist to completion. Astin’s theory of involvement and Tinto’s student departure model established it in the 1970s and 1980s; decades of work since have only sharpened it. Domain 5 starts here because it tells us what to measure. If connection and support are what keep students enrolled, then the baseline worth building is how well students are actually connecting to support right now.
When students are asked directly, the reasons are rarely academic. They are the pressures of adult life colliding with an institution that assumes students will come find it. The community college population carries these pressures more heavily than any other in higher education.
In the 2024 Lumina-Gallup study, 35% of students had considered leaving in the past six months. Among reasons, emotional stress led at 54%, mental health at 43%, and cost at 31%. Wellbeing, not grades, is what students say is at risk. [3]
The Hope Center’s 2023–24 survey of 74,350 students found 59% face food or housing insecurity. Among those who stopped out or were at risk of it, 79% cited basic needs and financial challenges. The need is not rare; it is the majority experience. [4]
About 80% of community college students work and 39% work full-time. Nearly two-thirds of students who start at a two-year college work 20+ hours a week. School is fitted into the margins of a working life, not the other way around. [5]
More than one in five community college students are parents, and in the 2024 CCSSE, 71% of caregiving students said caregiving could cause them to drop out. Student parents complete at 18% within six years, vs 54% for traditional students. [6]
These pressures are why so much help goes unused. The services that could relieve them exist on every campus, but a student working two jobs and caring for a parent does not have time to determine which office to call, and often does not recognize their own situation as something a service was built for. Only 55% of students say their institution communicates support well; 18% actively disagree. The gap between stopping out and staying enrolled is frequently a gap in awareness and connection, not in service availability. [4][7]
The case so far rests on the national research: large, multi-year studies of who persists and why. This next piece is far smaller, one early GCC survey, and we weight it that way. It is not the basis of our work, it is a local gut-check against the national pattern. When GCC faculty and staff documented the barriers they watch students hit, the picture lined up with the national story almost exactly. The biggest categories were not classroom problems. They were access, communication, and reaching the right service.
Sorted by what the barrier is about, the survey breaks down as student access (21), communication (19), getting to a service (19), and campus technology such as printing, wi-fi, login, and lab access (14), with comfort needs, textbooks, and printing close behind. Sorted by which department owns the fix, the most-named were IT, Advisement, and Basic Needs. The basic-needs pressure is not abstract here either: GCC Student Services reports that 44% of GCC students are food insecure. One survey does not prove a district, but it points the same direction as the national data: the help exists, and students cannot reliably find, reach, or afford to use it. That is precisely the gap AI can help close, and precisely what Initiative 2’s usability study is built to measure stop by stop.
The reason this matters is that the intervention works when the connection is made. Among caregiving students, those who persisted were much more likely than those who stopped out to report that their college had provided financial, basic-needs, and childcare support. The support was the difference. Closer to home, GCC’s own Peer Success Coach program found that students matched with a coach retained at higher rates than those who were not, local evidence that connection to a person keeps students enrolled. [6][9]
So the through-line is concrete. Initiative 1 maps where the help lives and counts how many students reach it now, the baseline. Initiative 2 finds where students fail to reach it. The evidence, this page, is the why: connection and support are what keep students enrolled. Initiative 3 turns all of it into AI that closes the gap, ranked by how many students each fix would touch, answering the simple factual questions itself and routing the ones that need a person to a human. The outcome we are aiming at is the one the research keeps naming: more students, more connected, completing degrees and programs.