California Community Colleges · Nectir AI Initiative
The Spring 2025 pilot measured a 3.1 percentage-point gain in course success. This is what a gain of that size is worth to the system and to an individual college, with the arithmetic shown and the assumptions named.
Prepared by Nectir September 2026 Fiscal basis: 2024-25 Investment schedule: Campuswide Expansion Initiative
The Year 1 study used a within-instructor quasi-experimental design: treatment sections compared against the same instructor’s own prior sections of the same course, in the same modality, at the same college. Outcomes came from the CCC MIS submission process. Two terms were analysed separately.
| Outcome | Control | Treatment | Difference | p |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Course success (pass rate) | 68.5% | 71.6% | +3.1 pp | <0.001 |
| Course retention (non-withdrawal) | 85.1% | 86.4% | +1.3 pp | 0.02 |
| Course GPA | 2.68 | 2.78 | +0.10 | 0.069 not sig. |
Fall 2024 was null on all three outcomes. The paper attributes this to first-term implementation conditions — IRB approval on July 30, a single faculty attendee at the July recruiting session, and no training or integration until the term was already underway. Every figure in this document derives from the Spring 2025 term only, and none of it should be read as a full-year 2024-25 result.
Retention and course success are not additive. A withdrawal is one way of not passing, so the +1.3 pp retention gain sits inside the +3.1 pp success gain rather than alongside it. Roughly 40% of the success gain is students who stayed enrolled; the remainder is students who would have finished either way and earned a passing grade instead of a failing one.
A course a student does not pass is, in most cases, a course the system delivers twice. Both deliveries are paid for.
| Borne by | Basis | Per course |
|---|---|---|
| Student | $46 per unit enrollment fee × 3 | $138 |
| State | SCFF base allocation $5,294 per FTES × 0.1 | $529 |
| Total | — | $667 |
One FTES is 30 semester units, or ten 3-unit courses. Applying the Spring 2025 effect to a single FTES: ten enrollments × 3.1% yields 0.31 additional passes; discounted to a 60% repeat rate, that is 0.186 repeats avoided; at $667 each, $124 per FTES per year.
The 60% discount is deliberate. Not every non-passing enrollment is repeated — some of those students leave the system altogether, which is a larger loss but not one this model attempts to price. Without the discount the figures below would be roughly 65% higher.
All 118 institutions are loaded with credit and noncredit FTES from the CCCCO Data Mart, Annual 2025–26.
| College / district size (credit FTES) | Annual investment | Colleges | Modeled return |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 5,000 | $35,000 | 27 | 5.8× – 17.4× |
| 5,000 – 10,000 | $50,000 | 42 | 12.5× – 24.8× |
| 10,000 – 15,000 | $65,000 | 26 | 20.2× – 28.1× |
| 15,000 – 20,000 | $80,000 | 13 | 24.0× – 30.2× |
| Over 20,000 | $95,000 | 7 | 27.1× – 35.0× |
| All credit-granting colleges | — | 115 | 5.8× – 35.0× |
Return varies with size because the investment is banded while the underlying value scales continuously with enrollment. The figures above assume the 60% repeat rate; the slider in the calculator shows how the range moves under other assumptions.
A repeated course is not waste from a district’s point of view — it generates apportionment like any other enrollment. The gain here is not a reduction in a college’s revenue but a release of instructional capacity: seats and sections no longer consumed by students taking a course a second time, available instead for new enrollment. At a system growing 4.6% year over year, that capacity has somewhere to go.
Across 1,108,474 credit FTES — roughly 11.1 million credit course enrollments a year — a sustained 3.1 pp gain in course success implies:
These are projections that assume the Spring 2025 effect holds at scale; what was measured is the table at the top of this page. The larger share of the figure lands in Proposition 98 apportionment rather than in fee revenue — a distinction that matters, since systemwide enrollment fee revenue is only $409 million against total system funding of $18.4 billion.
SCFF’s student success allocation pays districts for completions — degrees, certificates, transfer, and completion of transfer-level math and English in the first year. A sustained gain in course success feeds every one of those measures directly, and it would represent revenue to a district rather than avoided cost.
It is excluded from every figure in this document because we could not verify current per-outcome allocation rates with confidence. Running a representative college through the Chancellor’s Office SCFF estimator would size it properly, and we would rather do that jointly than estimate it ourselves.