April 11, 2007

Studies Examine How Starting at a Community College Affects the Path to a 4-Year Degree

How effectively do community colleges serve as conduits for students who hope to earn a bachelor’s degree? Two papers presented today at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, in Chicago, offered different ways of looking at that question.

One study — by Michal Kurlaender, an assistant professor of education at the University of California at Davis, and Bridget Terry Long, an associate professor of education and economics at Harvard University — examined the fate of 1,700 students who entered community colleges in Ohio in the 1998-99 academic year. When they began college, the students had taken the ACT and indicated that they planned to earn four-year degrees. Six years later, only 20.6 percent of them had earned a bachelor’s degree or were still actively working toward such a degree.

Ms. Kurlaender and Ms. Long concluded that, in general, the students would have been better off if they had initially enrolled in four-year-institutions. Controlling for high-school background, race, and socioeconomic status, they found that the students were 14 percent less likely to earn a bachelor’s degree within six years than were comparable students who had began in four-year institutions. (The study is not yet available online.)

The second paper drew on data from the National Education Longitudinal Study, which tracked thousands of students from 1988, when they were in the eighth grade, until 2000. The paper examined a group of 641 students who had entered community college in 1992 and later transferred to four-year institutions as juniors.

From that point forward, the researchers asked, did those transfer students fare any worse than a group of comparable students who had started at four-year institutions? The answer was no — the transfer students were just as likely to complete a bachelor’s degree, and earned just as many credits, as similar students who had begun college at four-year institutions. For the transfer students in this study, there was no penalty for having begun at a community college.

Tatiana Melguizo, an assistant professor of education at the University of Southern California who is one of the study’s authors, cautioned against taking too much comfort from that finding. The larger picture, she said, is that too few community-college students manage to transfer to four-year institutions in the first place.

Both Ms. Melguizo and Ms. Kurlaender said that state governments, community colleges, and four-year institutions should devote more resources to helping students to transfer successfully.

Ms. Melguizo’s paper was written with Mariana Alfonso, a research economist at the Inter-American Development Bank, and Gregory S. Kienzl, a research analyst at the American Institutes for Research. It is not available online. —David Glenn

Comments

1. So…is it helpful to have better new student orientation programs and follow up for community college students to want to transfer to four year institutions?

   — Jeanne    Apr 12, 09:17 AM    #

2. I would be interested in knowing whether or not the results differed by discipline … or whether those who had not earned a 4-year degree within 6 years were currently enrolled in school and/or still planned to return for further education later. These reports seem way too incomplete to used as the basis for any decision-making.

   — Linda    Apr 12, 09:37 AM    #

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