Community-college leaders have long said that the federal gauge of success — graduation rates — is not a good measure for their colleges. So colleges in six states teamed up to devise a new set of accountability measures.

The results provide a much clearer picture of what’s going on in two-year colleges, according to a recent report by Achieving the Dream, which works to improve student outcomes and helped design the new measures.

The federal government calculates two-year colleges’ graduation rates based on the number of full-time, first-time undergraduates who complete an associate degree within three years. Community colleges say those rates are all but meaningless because they do not include part-time students, who account for a large portion of their enrollments. The colleges also argue that the three-year window to earn a degree is too short because many community-college students start in remedial classes.

Achieving the Dream officials, instead, tracked student outcomes in Connecticut, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia over a six-year period. They included both part-time and full-time students, and they counted not only graduation but also significant progress toward a degree or transfer to a four-year institution as a “successful” outcome.

By those measures, the percentage of students who succeeded went up, ranging from 33 percent in Connecticut to 51 percent in Texas. The report acknowledges that extending the time frame to six years makes the rates look better, but it notes that including part-time students in the measures pulls success rates down. —Elyse Ashburn