Ann Arbor, Michigan -- Few community-college students with poor academic and economic backgrounds transfer to four-year institutions and earn baccalaureate degrees, say two educational researchers at the University of Michigan.
The community-college students who continue their education are typically those with greater academic preparation and financial resources who could have attended a four-year institution in the first place. They are simply taking advantage of a less expensive alternative, according to Valerie E. Lee, assistant professor of education, and Kenneth A. Frank, a research assistant.
While it is possible that individual students from disadvantaged backgrounds could seize the opportunity for “transformation” that two-year colleges provide, the researchers say in a report of their study, “we can offer little evidence that community colleges change individuals much.”
While he agrees with much of the information in the study, says Dale Parnell, president of the American Association of Community and Junior Colleges, he does not concur with the authors’ conclusions.
“I get a little tired of university professors always trying to measure us against their arbitrary standards,” he says. “The average age of our students is 29. They’re working people, and two-thirds of them are part-time students.”
For their work, the authors used data from “High School and Beyond,” a national study of American high-school students who were seniors in 1980. They analyzed the academic and social backgrounds of 2,500 community-college students, enrolled in both academic and occupational programs, who transferred to four-year institutions within four years after their high-school graduation.
According to the researchers, about a quarter of the students who go to community college right after high school transfer to a four-year college within four years, probably to pursue a degree. That means that 6 per cent of all high-school graduates take the community-college route to a baccalaureate, they say.
The students most likely to transfer to four-year institutions come from families with social and academic advantages, says the report. In high school, these students were in the academic track and took more mathematics and other academic courses. They graduated with high grades and high achievements. Those factors amount to “direct and positive influences” on students to transfer, the authors say.
“It is social disadvantage which impedes community-college students from transferring, through the effect of social class on virtually all the academic behaviors associated with transferring,” the authors conclude.
The report of the study, which was supported in part by the Exxon Education Foundation, is scheduled to be published next summer in Sociology of Education.