New America is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institute that invests in new thinkers and ideas to address the next generation of challenges facing the United States. Because community college students tend to be underserved by our current higher education structure, much of our research and subsequent policy analysis and recommendations are either targeted to help improve the path to a credential for community college students or to figure out how to better target aid and resources to low-income students, many of whom are community college students. Community colleges afford students an affordable opportunity to pursue higher education for a variety of reasons. How to measure their impact has yet to be answered.