Lauren Schudde

The Causal Effect of Campus Residency on College Student Retention

Despite theoretical evidence positing a positive relationship between campus residency and collegiate outcomes, prior research has not established a causal link. Utilizing propensity score matching and national longitudinal data, this study investigates whether living in university-owned housing impacts retention. The results suggest that the impact of living on campus is not negligible: the probability of remaining enrolled into the second year of college is 3.3 percentage points higher for on-campus residents than off-campus residents. Colleges should consider evaluating the impact of their campus housing programs on academic outcomes to inform important housing policy decisions.

On Second Chances and Stratification: How Sociologists Think about Community Colleges.

Community colleges increase college access, extending postsecondary educational opportunities to underserved students, yet, these students exhibit low rates of program completion and transfer to 4-year colleges. Sociological research on community colleges focuses on the tension between increasing educational opportunity and failing to improve equity in college completion across key demographics, such as race and socioeconomic status. This article provides an overview of sociology’s approach to understanding community colleges. We describe sociological theories, examine the contributions they make to the field, and discuss the discipline’s recent debates regarding community colleges. We conclude by highlighting research areas for further progress and discussing the role sociology could play in transforming community colleges.

Policy Levers to Strengthen Community College Transfer Student Success in Texas

Texas relies heavily on its community colleges to provide low-cost access to undergraduate coursework for students pursuing a bachelor’s degree.1 Yet, while the majority of Texas students who enter higher education through a community college enroll in transfer programs,2 only 35 percent transfer and only 15 percent earn a bachelor’s degree within six years of starting at a community college. Moreover, there is a large gap in bachelor’s degree attainment between lower-income students who start at a community college and transfer and their higher-income peers. Many community college students who intend to earn a bachelor’s degree make substantial progress in community college but fail to transfer. Among students who transfer, most do so without earning a community college credential.3 Many of those who do graduate end up earning excess credits, wasting their time and money, and making poor use of taxpayer resources.4 While twoto four-year transfer does not work well in many other states, in Texas it seems to be especially inefficient.5

Heterogeneous Effects in Education: The Promise and Challenge of Incorporating Intersectionality into Quantitative Methodological Approaches.

To date, the theory of intersectionality has largely guided qualitative efforts in social science and education research. Translating the construct to new methodological approaches is inherently complex and challenging, but offers the possibility of breaking down silos that keep education researchers with similar interests—but different methodological approaches—from sharing knowledge. Quantitative approaches that emphasize the varied impacts of individual identities on educational outcomes move beyond singular dimensions capturing individual characteristics, drawing a parallel to intersectionality. Scholars interested in heterogeneous effects recognize the shortcomings of focusing on the effect of a single social identity. This integrative review explores techniques used in quantitative research to examine heterogeneous effects across individual background, drawing on methodological literature from the social sciences and education. I examine the goals and challenges of the quantitative techniques and explore how they relate to intersectionality. I conclude by discussing what education researchers can learn from other applied fields that are working to develop a crosswalk across the two disparate, but interconnected, literatures.

Ease of Access and Usefulness of Transfer Information on Community College Websites in Texas

Many first-time community college entrants aspire to earn a bachelor’s degree, but few do. To transfer, students often must overcome information constraints to navigate bureaucratic hurdles and conflicting requirements. For a sample of 20 Texas community colleges, we reviewed college websites, assessing the ease of access and usefulness of online transfer information, and spoke to key transfer personnel about the information provided to students. We used a qualitative case study approach to triangulate findings from our data sources. Approximately two thirds of colleges in the sample fell below the highest standard on our rubric for either ease of access or usefulness, indicating room for improvement at most institutions. Many personnel we interviewed recognized the strengths and limitations of their college’s online information, though several were ambivalent regarding the need for improving online transfer information, arguing that the availability of online information alone is insufficient for successful transfer and not as important as face-to-face advising. Our research illustrates the need for colleges to develop and update their online information with care, determining which information students need to transfer (including transfer guides for partner programs/colleges), how students might search for that information, and ensuring that necessary transfer information is available and up-to-date. The framework provided by our rubric may guide institutions in the evaluation of their online transfer information.

Performance Requirements in Need-Based Aid: What Roles Do They Serve, and Do They Work?

Need-based financial aid programs are often considered the backbone of national efforts to ensure college access for students regardless of their family background. The federal government is the largest provider of such aid, delivering

Performance Standards in Need-Based Student Aid

28 billion in Pell Grants and

Pell Grants as Performance-Based Scholarships? An Examination of Satisfactory Academic Progress Requirements in the Nation’s Largest Need-Based Aid Program

47 billion in Stafford Loans to undergraduates in 2015–16 (Baum, Ma, Pender, & Welch, 2016). More than half of all undergraduates benefit from one of these two programs in a given academic year.1 Need-based aid, available to college students regardless of where they attend and without respect to prior achievement, is often discussed in contrast to merit-based aid, which is contingent upon students’ academic performance.

Short- and Long-Term Impacts of Engagement Experiences with Faculty and Peers at Community Colleges

College attendance is a risky investment. But students may not recognize when they are at risk for failure, and financial aid introduces the possibility for moral hazard. Academic performance standards can serve three roles in this context: signaling expectations for success, providing incentives for increased student effort, and limiting financial losses. Such standards have existed in federal need-based aid programs for nearly 40 years in the form of Satisfactory Academic Progress (SAP) requirements, yet have received virtually no academic attention. In this paper, we sketch a simple model to illustrate not only student responses to standards but also the tradeoffs faced by a social planner weighing whether to set performance standards in the context of need-based aid. We then use regression discontinuity and difference-in-difference designs to examine the consequences of SAP failure. In line with theoretical predictions, we find heterogeneous effects in the short term, with negative impacts on persistence but positive effects on grades for students who remain enrolled. After three years, the negative effects appear to dominate. Effects on credits attempted are 2–3 times as large as effects on credits earned, suggesting that standards increase the efficiency of aid expenditures. But it also appears to exacerbate inequality in higher education by pushing out low-performing low-income students faster than their equally low-performing, but higher-income peers.