个体院校在构建从社区学院到学士学位的有效且高效转学路径中的作用

摘要

Community colleges potentially offer a cost-effective path to earning a bachelor’s degree, though this path is bumpy for many students. This paper investigates how transfer pathways could be improved, with a focus on the role of specific institutions. We study the universe of all new undergraduates in the U.S. that receive Federal student aid tracked across all institutions for eight years. We first find that BA aspirants that start at a community college are 21.6 percentage points less likely to earn a BA within eight years of first enrolling than similar students who start directly at a public four-year college, though they accumulate $3400 less loan debt to do so. Community college thus offers a lower cost, but less certain path to BA completion. We then use the large number of cross-institution transfers occurring in the US student population to identify the contribution of individual institutions to these patterns while also controlling for unobserved student factors by estimating a student and institution fixed effects model. We find substantial variation in the estimated impacts of enrolling at individual institutions on students’ persistence and debt accumulation; however, the difference in persistence effects between the public two- and four-year sectors is insufficient to explain the entirety of gap in their BA completion rates. Increasing all two-years’ persistence effects by 1 standard deviation would only increase the BA completion rate by 3.8 percentage points. We conclude that feasible improvements in individual community colleges’ ability to get students to persist, in isolation, are unlikely to bring meaningful pathway improvement. Rather, the creation of stronger and more effective pathways between specific two- and four-year institutions is likely to generate greater increases in BA degree attainment.