Equity in Context: Institutional Agency in Targeting Student Supports in Massachusetts Community Colleges

ABSTRACT

How do related, but independent community colleges operationalize and implement an equity‐oriented initiative? In 2021, Massachusetts established the SUCCESS initiative to provide nonfinancial student supports in all 15 of the state's public community colleges. This paper draws on 35 interviews with program staff across the colleges to ask how they used their institutional data and designed new data collections to (1) select a focal population for their SUCCESS program and (2) apply their criteria to identify a specific cohort. While we find variation in what the colleges viewed as their most urgent equity gaps, we find that in all colleges, data availability informed how practitioners could identify their focal students. Our findings illustrate how diverse community colleges within one state respond differently to the same equity‐oriented initiative; they operationalize equity in different ways that are related to their institutional priorities and data availability.