Community Colleges and Tracking in Higher Education

The Pursuit of Student Success: The Directions and Challenges Facing Community Colleges

“…The indicators clearly point to a condition where students with backgrounds more likely to add difficulty in accessing a baccalaureate are also more likely to attend a community college. Despite the differences in the populations who begin college at community colleges from those who begin at 4-year universities, there is no shortage of respected studies that level a causal accusation stating that students who seek a 4-year degree become "disadvantaged" if they begin their studies at a community college (Alba & Lavin, 1981;Brint, 2003;Choy, 2002;Long & Kurlaender, 2008). The obvious and stated policy implication of these works is that students aspiring to the baccalaureate should solely attend a 4-year institution and not consider community college attendance.…”

Cooling Out in the Community College: What is the Effect of Academic Advising on Students’ Chances of Success?

“…However, Black students who received advising were slightly less likely to remediate successfully than were Black students who did not receive advising. One interpretation of this finding is that some aspect of the advising process tends, on average, to discourage underprepared Black students from the pursuit of college-level math skills, perhaps in a fashion akin to the cooling out processes described by Clark. Although the connection between cooling out and issues of social conflict, particularly the reproduction of class structure, is far from new (e.g., Alba and Lavin 1981;Dougherty 1987;Karabel 1972;McClelland 1990;Rosenbaum 2001), the proposition that cooling out may tend to be moderated by the race of the student is both novel and controversial. Such a proposition, however, is not without contextual support.…”

The impact of community college attendance on baccalaureate attainment

“…If the determinants of baccalaureate attainment are correlated with the type of college chosen, then not accounting for the selection problem produces biases in the estimates of the 2-year and 4-year college effects (Rouse, 1995). Among the existing literature on the effect of community college attendance on baccalaureate attainment, there is one study that controlled for self-selection into 2-year and 4-year colleges by exploiting a natural experiment that took place in the fall of 1970 at the City University of New York (CUNY) (Alba and Lavin, 1981). That year, CUNY initiated an open-admissions program, a policy change that in the evaluation literature is known as a natural experiment, that guaranteed a place in the university to any graduate of a New York City high school.…”

“…The percentage of students who started at a 4-year college and attained a bachelor's degree, in contrast, is a high 71%. Even when a wide array of variables are controlled for, as the relatively extensive literature attempting to explain the baccalaureate attainment gap between community college and 4-year college students shows, the baccalaureate attainment gap continues to be significantly in favor of 4-year attendees (Alba and Lavin, 1981;Anderson, 1981;Christie and Hutcheson, 2003;Rouse, 1995;Velez, 1985;Whitaker and Pascarella, 1994).…”