Want to Close Achievement Gaps? Focus on Part-Time Students

If community colleges want to shrink stubborn achievement gaps between white and minority students, they should focus more attention on the nearly two-thirds of their students who attend part time, a study released Monday concludes.

The report, “Reframing the Question of Equity,” is among the topics of discussion at the annual meeting here of the American Association of Community Colleges. It was prepared by EAB, a major player in the enrollment-services industry, and based on data analysis and interviews with more than 100 community-college leaders.

Despite huge investments in success strategies at community colleges, the gap in degree attainment between white and Hispanic students has remained unchanged, the report notes. Meanwhile, the disparities between white and black students have grown slightly. The same problems hold true for other underrepresented groups. Low-income, first-generation students are nearly four times more likely than their peers to drop out after their first year, the report notes.

Part of the problem, according to the study, is that minority and first-generation students are more likely to attend college part time, but student-success efforts usually focus on full-time students.

Since students who take 30 credit hours per year are more likely to graduate, it makes sense to encourage a more intensive schedule for those who can handle it, Christina Hubbard, director of strategic research at EAB, agrees. But as long as there are students juggling family obligations and jobs with classwork, part-timers will continue to make up a significant chunk of the student population at two-year colleges. The EAB report notes that 60 percent of community-college students enroll part time and 83 percent will attend part time or stop out at least once.

“Because the proportion of underrepresented minority, low-income, and first-generation students is so high and they are more likely to attend part time, student success initiatives that target full-time students will not close the achievement gap as effectively as focusing on part-time students,” the report concludes.

According to the report, 84 percent of Hispanic students and 81 percent of black students enroll part time for at least one term compared with 72 percent of white students. For Hispanic students, attending part time — even for only one semester — means a 39-percent drop in completion rates compared with full-time attendance. For white students, the switch from full-time to part-time status results in only a 29 percent decline in completion rates.

EAB, which used to be called the Education Advisory Board, uses predictive analytics to identify barriers that might trip up students and offers technological tools that connect struggling students with campus resources.

Keeping part-timers engaged is particularly important today in light of declining enrollments at many two-year colleges. The relatively healthy economy means that adults who would have gone to college to learn new skills during a recession are back in the work force. Meanwhile, demographic changes in many parts of the country have left the pool of high-school graduates stagnant or shrinking.

Colleges are making progress attracting more disadvantaged students to their campuses, but many are struggling and dropping out with no credentials and a lot of debt. Low graduation rates have prompted legislators in a growing number of states to base a portion of an institution’s funding on performance indicators, including graduation rates.

Based on findings that full-time students are more likely to make it to the finish line, a flurry of reform efforts have encouraged students to sign up for 30 credit hours per year, giving up a job and zeroing in on coursework if necessary.

That goal is one of the central strategies of Complete College America, a nonprofit that has spurred lawmakers and colleges in many states to adopt its proposals on full-time attendance, performance-based funding, and other completion strategies.

The Complete College Tennessee Act of 2018, pushed by Gov. Bill Haslam, would have required recipients of the state’s two lottery-funded scholarships to complete 30 credit hours per year. That bill was narrowly defeated this month after lawmakers argued that it would unfairly penalize students who are unable to attend full-time.

Guided pathways that have caught on in popularity as a way to keep students on track are often designed in term-by-term formats with full-time students in mind. They often lack guidance that would help part-time students piece together the proper sequence of courses. A student who struggles with science might get overwhelmed, for example, with a semester that includes too many intensive science courses.

Help is often less readily available to part-time students. Those who attend classes in the evening typically have less access to tutors and counselors and struggle to engage with peers or faculty members.

In addition, “Many students lose momentum as they face unexplained delays, generic information, confusing terminology, and transfers between college departments,” the report notes. Individualized guidance that nudges them along each step would help keep them enrolled, it suggests.

Part-timers also tend to have unrealistic expectations about how long it will take them to graduate — if they finish at all. Forty seven percent of part-timers polled figured they’d be out in one to two years, but in fact, even when that timeline was extended to four years, only 8 percent graduated (see chart below).

The EAB analysis concludes that closing the achievement gap among part-time students would decrease the discrepancy between black and white students by 13 percentage points. The difference between Hispanic and white students would decrease by seven percentage points. If the focus, by contrast, is only on full-time students, the overall equity gains are much smaller, the report finds. If full-time Hispanic and black students graduated at the same rates as full-time white students, the overall achievement gaps would improve by just one or five percentage points respectively.

“There’s a huge opportunity here to advance equity in education if we can provide better support to part-time students,” Hubbard says.

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.