D. Timothy Leinbach

Is Student Success Labeled Institutional Failure? Student Goals and Graduation Rates in the Accountability Debate at Community Colleges

Community colleges are open-door institutions serving many students with characteristics that can make college completion a challenge. Their graduation rates are often considered low, but their students do not always have earning a degree as a goal. While individuals may feel that their college experience was a success, standard graduation rate measures of performance count a student’s enrollment as a failure unless it culminates in a credential or transfer to a four-year institution. This paper explores the impact of students’ reasons for enrollment and educational expectations on their outcomes and, thus, on the performance of their college, showing that community college students with degree and transfer goals are more likely to graduate or transfer. Still, an analysis suggests that even among only students who state that their goal is a degree, certificate, or transfer, fewer than 50 percent achieve that goal within six years. Moreover, large gaps in success rates for Black and Hispanic students cannot be explained by differences in either their reason for enrolling or their educational expectations. We also show that students’ educational expectations should not be treated as fixed, and that, not surprisingly, the experience of college has a role in shaping their expectations. We conclude that educators and policy makers should be cautious in using student goals as benchmarks for success, and that assumptions about student goals should not be used to discourage efforts to improve overall performance and reduce disparities between groups. Colleges need to recognize the dynamic nature of student intentions and expectations, the factors that shape these goals before entering college, and the institutional role in shaping them while at college.

Using Longitudinal Data to Increase Community College Student Success: A Guide to Measuring Milestone and Momentum Point Attainment

Most community colleges and many state community college systems collect extensive data on individual students. Unfortunately, these data are often underutilized in efforts to improve outcomes for individual students and colleges. Community college systems and their constituent colleges have only recently come to realize the potential for using student unit record (SUR) data for more than reporting student enrollments and program graduates. By organizing these data into termby-term student transcript records over several years and incorporating individual student demographic data, colleges and states can create a powerful resource for understanding patterns of student progression and achievement over time. Understanding how students actually progress through their college programs is essential in developing strategies and choosing appropriate interventions to improve student outcomes. The challenge is to build expertise and capacity in college and state agency research departments to transform raw SUR data into meaningful information of practical use for policymakers and practitioners.

The Effects of Institutional Factors on the Success of Community College Students.

Community colleges are the gateway to higher education for many students who would otherwise have limited access to college, particularly those who are from low-income households or are ethnic minorities, firstgeneration college students, or immigrants. Yet only about one-third of all community college students receives any degree or certificate even eight years after initial college enrollment. And credit accumulation and completion rates are even lower for minority and low-income students. Meanwhile, community college student outcomes, as measures of college effectiveness, are of increasing concern for institutional accountability. The Bush administration and many legislators in Congress would like to hold postsecondary institutions to higher standards of accountability, just as they have done with elementary and secondary schools. Institutional reporting requirements to the Department of Education now include data for graduation rates overall and broken out by gender and race/ethnicity. More than half of all states take into account the performance of public colleges when determining higher education appropriations. The use of completion rates as the primary yardstick for accountability puts pressure on community colleges to improve student outcomes. Yet, community college advocates have resisted the use of completion rates either as an accountability measure or as a normative goal. They argue that many community college students only want to learn new skills or enroll for personal enrichment – goals for which such students may obtain tangible benefits. Further, many factors that may create barriers to student completion are beyond the control of colleges, such as a student’s poor academic preparation. Because community colleges must accept all eligible students seeking to enroll, they often have student populations comprised of individuals who would not be admitted to more selective institutions or who may have many challenges to graduation. For such reasons, standard completion measures such as graduation rates may judge community colleges unfairly. Still, measuring institutional graduation rates can provide useful information about differences among colleges, such as leading researchers to identify policies and practices that might promote student success at those colleges with higher relative rates. For an individual college, analysis of its completion rates can be an important way to measure the effectiveness of its policies and practices relative to other similar institutions. This Brief summarizes a research project, conducted by the Community College Research Center (CCRC) and one component of a Ford Foundation-funded study on minority degree attainment at community colleges, which used institution-level data to analyze the effect of community college characteristics on student performance. The study provides an important first step in identifying the institutional factors – characteristics, policies, and programs – that contribute to improved educational outcomes for community college students.

Beyond Student Right-to-Know Data: Factors That Can Explain Community College Graduation Rates

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. A related public concern is how the outcomes of community college students can be improved. Therefore, attempts are now being made to clarify the way that specific students define success and to identify the college policies and practices that can promote success for all students. For some community college students, college completion, defined as earning a degree or certificate, is the appropriate measure of success. For other students, success is demonstrated by transferring to a baccalaureate institution. Still others are satisfied with completing courses that increase their knowledge or skill level in a particular area even though their educational experience is not considered successful as defined by traditional educational outcomes. Because of this range of outcomes for their students, some community colleges argue that focusing on the completion rate of a college is misleading, because many students do not have graduation as an objective. Further, many students face insurmountable barriers to success in college, such as family and work responsibilities and deficient academic preparation, which are beyond the control of the college. Nevertheless, data on goals and expectations do indicate that community college students are ambitious and that a majority of students who state that they want to complete a degree fail to do so (Bailey, Jenkins, & Leinbach, 2005). Moreover, high aspirations make economic sense since earning only a few credits without completing a certificate or degree has few income returns (Bailey, Kienzl, & Marcotte, 2004). 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.

Educational Outcomes of Postsecondary Occupational Students

This Brief discusses a research study that was conducted to determine the rates of degree completion of community college occupational students compared with other types of postsecondary students, and to identify factors that might explain those differences. Much of the existing literature on college persistence and completion is focused on baccalaureate students and pays little attention to students in community colleges, and even fewer studies consider differences by students’ program of study. Therefore, it is important to investigate whether students in occupational programs in community colleges persist in postsecondary education and attain degrees at similar rates as their academic and baccalaureate peers. Community college students, as defined here, are those taking for-credit courses at a two-year or less than two-year institution, or at a four-year institution, and who are pursuing a certificate or associate degree, or seeking no degree. Thus, community college student is a descriptive term independent of the type of institution the student is attending; rather, the designation is based on the student’s type of degree program. While we include some students at four-year institutions because of their stated degree objective, nearly 90 percent of all community college students fitting this definition attend two-year or less than two-year institutions, with more than threequarters attending public two-year institutions. Occupational students constitute a group within the community college student population whose self-reported major is in one of the following vocational fields of study: agricultural business and production, agricultural sciences, business, communication technologies, computer and information science, construction, engineering, engineering technologies, health professions, home economics, mechanics and repair, personal services, precision production, protective services, science technologies, or transportation. Academic students also comprise a group of community college students. Their self-reported major is in an academic field of study (humanities, mathematics, science, or social science). Baccalaureate students are those taking for-credit courses toward a bachelor’s degree at a four-year institution.