Policymakers, educators, and researchers recognize the importance of community colleges as open door institutions that provide a wide range of students with access to college. At the same time, competing demands for the state funds that would support community colleges have resulted in reduced public allocations and higher student tuition fees. Understandably, therefore, both state policymakers and parents are increasingly focused on the returns to their public or private investments in education, and the outcomes of community college attendance are now under greater scrutiny. To facilitate the evaluation of the colleges, there are now available data, through the Student Right-to-Know and Campus Security Act (1990), which amended the Higher Education Act, on every college's graduation rate for fall semester cohorts of first-time, fulltime (FTFT) students in degree programs. This information is known as the Student Right-to-Know (SRK) data. Given the importance of completions, this Brief reports on research conducted by the Community College Research Center designed to strengthen the public's ability to assess and compare community college performance by measuring the effect of certain institutional characteristics on graduation rates. The research consisted of the development of models, based on SRK graduation rate data, which can identify the institutional characteristics that might influence those rates and then measure the effect of those characteristics on the rates. The ultimate goal of the research is to help community college?s improve the educational outcomes of their students.