Community Engagement and the Educational Success of Underrepresented Students

This article introduces a special of issue of the Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement focused on a 5-year research project examining the impact of community engagement on the educational success of underrepresented students. A research team from six universities was supported with a multiyear grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) program. This research project is one of the few multi-institutional, multiyear investigations to compare the similarities and differences of outcomes across different types of community engagement practices and institutional and community settings, one of the few research projects on community engagement outcomes focused on the experiences of underrepresented students, and one of only a handful of community engagement–focused studies to use propensity score matching to address the persistent criticism in community engagement research regarding the lack of attention to group equivalence between treatment and comparison groups.