| James Benson
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Community colleges and the students that attend them: Did late twentieth century state policies improve success?
FINAL REPORT
Rates of credit and degree attainment are so low at community colleges that it is fair to question whether students, and the broader society, are recouping their investments. Given the degree of consensus regarding the importance of college attainment, there is a need for policies that incentivize and support actions that lead to increased attainment. Low levels of attainment at community colleges’Äîand the important role that community colleges play in expanding access to postsecondary education’Äîmake community college students a logical focus for a research agenda aimed at expanding attainment. I argue that states can play an important role in creating the conditions that lead to postsecondary attainment for community college students.
This study seeks to address the shortage of useful studies on state policies and postsecondary attainment for community college students, by assessing whether a set of popular and widely dispersed state-level policies have promoted credit and degree attainment. I analyze three policy types: graduation credit requirements; high stakes exit exams, and curriculum reform policies. Student-level and postsecondary transcript data for this study come from the High School and Beyond-Sophomore Cohort (HSB); the High School and Beyond Postsecondary Education Transcript Study, version 2 (PT2); the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS); and the NELS Postsecondary Education Transcript Study (PETS:2000). Measures of state policies come from a variety of governmental and independent survey sources; these have been merged into a unique, longitudinal database of policy measures aligned to the HSB and NELS studies.
This study employs a two-step modeling strategy which corrects for observed and unobserved heterogeneity among students, to arrive at causal estimates of the relationships between policies and postsecondary attainment. Findings from this study indicate that, of the three policy types evaluated, curriculum reform policies’Äîaimed at improving the content of the high school curriculum in core academic subjects’Äîare most consistently, and positively, related to postsecondary attainment. Prescription of specific course syllabi is consistently and negatively related to postsecondary attainment. High stakes exit exams are weakly related to degree attainment; this relationship is stronger and more consistent when the tests are more rigorous. This study finds no evidence that graduation credit requirements are significantly associated with subsequent postsecondary attainment for community college students.
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