0 Guest Blog: The Trouble with Transfer Articulation Policies

Today's blog is authored by Josipa Roksa, assistant professor at the University of Virginia

Once again, transfer articulation policies are in the news, being touted as a viable solution to the problem of low transfer rates between 2-year and 4-year colleges.

Articulation policies sound like a good idea, but there are a few pieces of empirical evidence that should give us pause. Consider the following questions:

(1) Do states with articulation policies (and particularly those with more comprehensive articulation policies) have higher transfer rates?

According to at least three recent studies, the answer is no.

For example, see:
Gregory M. Anderson, Jeffrey C. Sun, and Mariana Alfonso Anderson, “Effectiveness of Statewide Articulation Agreements on the Probability of Transfer: A Preliminary Policy Analysis” The Review of Higher Education, 29 no 3 (2006).

Betheny Gross and Dan Goldhaber, “Community College Transfer and Articulation Policies: Looking Beneath the Surface.” Working paper # 2009_1R. University of Washington Bothell: Center on Reinventing Public Education (April 2009)

Josipa Roksa, “Building Bridges for Student Success: Are Higher Education Articulation Policies Effective?,” Teachers College Record 111 (2009).

(2) Do states with articulation policies have higher bachelor’s degree completion rates, shorter time-to-degree, and/or less “wasted” credits among their transfer students?

The answer, again, is no.

See:
Josipa Roksa, and Bruce Keith,“Credits, Time, and Attainment: Articulation Policies and Success after Transfer,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 30 (2008).

(3) How many credits do four-year entrants earn on their path toward a bachelor’s degree?

Community college transfers are not the only ones earning 140 credits. A recent report noted that students who transferred from community colleges to the California State University (CSU) system graduated with an average of 141 credits. And how many credits did students who began in the CSU system graduate with? 142!! The situation is only slightly better in Florida: Associate of Arts (AA) transfers completed 137 credits before graduation while native four-year students averaged approximately 133 credits. Similar patterns are observed in national data: students starting in four-year institutions (and even those who attend only one four-year institution) earn more (and often many more) than 120 credits.

In conclusion: yes, low transfer rates are a problem, but there is no empirical evidence to suggest that articulation policies are the solution. This does not mean that we should not work on streamlining credit accumulation, or that the transfer process should not be more transparent and consistent. But it does mean that relying on articulation policies to increase bachelor’s degree attainment or improve efficiency in higher education is more hopeful than realistic.

0 Thoughts on Tucson

This isn't an education story, per se. But it's too important to ignore.

The education angle to the recent tragedy in Tucson, Arizona is the fact that the apparent shooter recently attended a local community college. While I think it is unfair to hold Pima Community College responsible for Jared Loughner, this New York Times article and Sunday's Washington Post editorial does raise some smart questions about what could have been done differently, most notably having sought an involuntary mental evaluation of the suspect. Hindsight, of course, is 20/20.

Currently, too much of the public conversation about Tucson is about culpability and about the role of political discourse in fueling the violence. Those are possibly irrelevant or overly simplistic conversations. It is unclear if political discourse had much bearing on Loughner's decision to do what he did. Sunday's New York Times story suggests that his twisted belief that "women should not be allowed to hold positions of power or authority" may have been a crucial factor. Clearly, the accused shooter is responsible (although our justice system will make the official determination of guilt). Is anyone else? His parents? Institutions like his former community college? What about the state of Arizona for having gun laws on the books that allowed Loughner to legally purchase his weapon and ammunition? Fundamentally, taken to it logical end, the finger points directly at the collective 'us'. We have elected leaders who have shaped our current gun laws.

And that's the tougher conversation that no one in power seems to want to have: Our current laws on access to firearms are senseless and extreme when compared to other nations. Semiautomatic weapons (such as the one used by Loughner in this tragedy) and extended magazines have no legitimate place in civil society. Why could someone like Loughner legally purchase a Glock semiautomatic handgun and an extended magazine? Why should anyone be able to for that matter?

Nicholas Kristof recent op-ed in the New York Times (Why Not Regulate Guns As Seriously As Toys?) raised some pointed questions in this regard.

Jared Loughner was considered too mentally unstable to attend community college. He was rejected by the Army. Yet buy a Glock handgun and a 33-round magazine? No problem.

A few suggestions he offered:

[B]an oversize magazines, such as the 33-bullet magazine allegedly used in Tucson. If the shooter had had to reload after firing 10 bullets, he might have been tackled earlier.

We can also learn from Australia, which in 1996 banned assault weapons... [T]he Journal of Public Health Policy notes that after the ban, the firearm suicide rate dropped by half in Australia over the next seven years, and the firearm homicide rate was almost halved.

Where are our political leaders on gun control? No where to be found. They're all still playing duck 'n' cover with the National Rifle Association. Even, in Arizona, they say this incident doesn't change anything. Guns don't kill people. People kill people. Of course. [UPDATE: Some lawmakers even want to make the state's gun laws even more lax. Apparently, it isn't enough that Arizona is already one of only three U.S. states that allows residents to carry concealed weapons without training or even a background check.]

Frank Rich hits several nails on their heads in Sunday's New York Times. I'll let his words speak for themselves:

Of the many truths in President Obama’s powerful Tucson speech, none was more indisputable than his statement that no one can know what is in a killer’s mind. So why have we spent so much time debating exactly that?

The answer is classic American denial. It was easier to endlessly parse Jared Lee Loughner’s lunatic library — did he favor “The Communist Manifesto” or Ayn Rand? — than confront the larger and harsher snapshot of our current landscape that emerged after his massacre....

Let’s also face another tragedy: The only two civic reforms that might have actually stopped him — tighter gun control and an effective mental health safety net — won’t materialize even now.

No editorial — or bloodbath — will move Congress to enact serious gun control (which Giffords herself never advocated and Obama has rarely pushed since 2008). Enhanced mental health coverage is also a nonstarter when the highest G.O.P. priority is to repeal the federal expansion of health care. In Arizona, cutbacks are already so severe that terminally ill patients are being denied life-saving organ transplants.

My thoughts and prayers go out to the victims, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and their families. Here's hoping that some good can come as a result of this tragedy, but I'm not overly optimistic.

0 Helping Ourselves

There's a bit of an uproar in California over an arrangement between the for-profit Kaplan University and the California Community College Chancellor's Office that makes it possible for students locked out of community college courses to enroll in a Kaplan course at a reduced rate. The arrangement stems from the overcrowding and under-resourcing of the California community college system, which is nothing less than under siege. Of course, it also stems from a completely sensible desire of Kaplan to expand its reach and enrollment. The California State Legislature, by failing to adequately support its community colleges, created that opportunity. Kaplan is doing exactly what we'd expect any educator to do--responding to student demand. We denigrate that action only because it will also result in profits. Let's at least be honest about that.

To me the really distasteful part of the backlash against Kaplan comes from those who are outraged that an agreement was reached to ensure the transferability of credits--an arrangement in which faculty were not consulted. Faculty members are used to being consulted on which courses they will and will not accept. Professors like to sign off on what courses can count to "replace" theirs--seemingly because they want to ensure educational quality, but let's face it, it's also because it helps to protect their jobs. The more courses deemed transferrable, the more it will become clear that the current system is inefficient--if many courses equate with each other, why have so many different people in different places teaching them?

But undergraduate education isn't meant to serve faculty; it's meant to serve students. This is something people seem to ready to forget. The president of the Academic Senate of the California Community Colleges was quite straightforward about her priorities when she told a reporter, "I'm hard pressed to see where we could...make this favorable to faculty." Huh? Since when is ensuring the continuation of a degree, and the portability of credits, meant to be about helping the faculty?

I get it--this move opens the door to a lot of scary possibilities. One is that Kaplan and other for-profits will fulfill a need and let the Legislature off the hook in future funding of state higher education. The degree to which we treat that as negative should be at least partly informed by empirical evidence on how California's community college students fare at Kaplan. Kaplan is to be commended for providing the data to allow a study on that topic to take place, and Scott Lay, president of the Community College League of California is a smart guy to recognize that as a real opportunity. Make that commitment a real one, and assess the outcomes of the arrangement. Then we'll have something more solid with which to pass judgment: evidence on how this affects students.

0 For-Profits vs Community Colleges -- The Debate Continues...

Are students attending for-profit institutions getting their money's worth, especially compared to attending community college? I've tackled this one before. Now, another study commissioned by a for-profit has appeared, claiming to fill gaps in our knowledge.

Since I only have a powerpoint presentation of the findings to review, and my opinion is pretty-well expressed in other media coverage, I'll just hit a few notes I've not yet seen mentioned elsewhere.

1. The authors want to claim that the for-profit sector is outpacing community colleges' capacity for enrollment expansion. To back this up, they compare recent enrollment growth in the two sectors. But they fail to mention the very different levels of overall enrollment --community colleges enrolled approximately 1.2 million more students in 2009 than were enrolled in 2007-- in comparison there were 1.4 million students total in for-profit institutions in 2007. Growth is affected by the starting point, and obviously capacity is too. It's harder to expand capacity when one's already nearing capacity. Moreover, this kind of assertion ignores the fact that the expansion of community college enrollment depends on the availability of public resources-- in comparison, the for-profit sector does not, and is correspondingly more nimble. But whether that's a "good" thing is far from clear.

2. The authors also purport that for-profit students realize greater wage gains from their investment. But they neglect the fact that community college students begin with higher earnings--and experience nearly the same dollar gains (over $7000). It is arguably more difficult to stimulate an increase in earnings for those who are better-off to start with compared to someone who starts at minimum wage (e.g. to bring someone from $21K to $28K, compared to $15K to $22K).

3. The study also indicates that for-profit students do not appear to know less about debt than other students. Given that they take on more loans, from a wider range of sources, "not knowing less" is insufficient-- if anything, the burden's on the for-profits to do a better than average job since their grads incur more than average debt.

All that said, I applaud the for-profits for their willingness to consider hard facts and data. I'd like to see them provide longitudinal student-unit record data to independent researchers so we can begin to sort out some of the bigger, lingering questions about student learning and the like. Maybe that's in the future.

0 Jumping to Conclusions

In a recent post on Education Week's Inside School Research blog, Debra Viadero offers a caution about President Obama's support for community colleges. Pointing to her recent article on community college research that indicated how much more we need to know about how best to improve completion rates in that sector, she questions whether the president would be wiser to place his bets on career colleges. She says that a recent study by the Educational Policy Institute (EPI) and an ongoing program of research by James Rosenbaum and colleagues support her contention that community colleges ought to take cues from career colleges.

In my opinion, this talented reporter is jumping to conclusions.

Yes, the graduation rates at two-year for-profit colleges exceed those at two-year public colleges. No one disputes that. That does not necessarily mean, however, that career colleges are outperforming community colleges, or that community colleges should take steps to become more like career colleges. The plausible alternative explanations for the differences in results are numerous. For example, the students attending the two types of colleges may differ in important yet unmeasured ways, ways that are associated with chances of graduation (what researchers refer to as selection bias). Is one group more economically or educationally advantaged? More motivated? More apt to have a family, nighttime work, or receive tuition support from an employer? It's also possible that the differences in graduation rates stem from constraints that community colleges face but career colleges do not-for example, inadequate resources or a lack of control over mission or governance. It's one thing to point to differences in practices between the community colleges and for-profit colleges, and another thing to attribute those differences to variation in the "will" or intentions of practitioners, rather than attribute them to under-funding and all that comes with it.

Establishing that community colleges have poorer graduation rates than career colleges for reasons they can and should do something about requires evidence that the two differ on one or more key aspects that is causally linked to college completion. Say we knew that smaller classes caused better student retention-and community colleges have larger classes than career colleges. We'd then be able to say, there's something community colleges ought to fix. But we don't have evidence that that's the case.

Instead, research simply establishes that (a) career and community colleges have different graduation rates and (b) career and community colleges (sometimes) employ different institutional practices. Rosenbaum and his colleagues have done a nice job, as Viadero notes, of documenting the latter-using qualitative methods, mostly at colleges in the Chicago area. But they have not shown that those practices cause observable differences in graduation rates. Moreover, while they've produced one paper indicating that differences in the student populations at career and community colleges do not appear to account for disparities in outcomes, that analysis is based solely on a limited set of observable characteristics-and therefore don't rule out the possibility that different levels of student motivation, for example, are really the culprit. Just think about how students get to college-many at career colleges are actively recruited (sometimes off their living room couches) while many at community colleges effectively wander in the door. Why would we think, then, that career and community colleges are serving the same kinds of people and producing different results?

There's another consideration Viadero neglects, and that's college costs. Students at career colleges leave with far more debt than students at community colleges. Data from the 2007-2008 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study reveal that 61% of community college students graduate with less than $10,000 in debt, compared to only 22% of students graduating from 2 year for-profits. In contrast, 19% of graduates from 2 year for-profits have $30,000 or more in student loans, compared to only 5% of community college graduates. Nearly all students (98%) finishing at 2 year for-profit colleges have taken on a loan, compared to just 38% of community college graduates. Is that a problem? Is it offset by higher rates of graduation? The answers are far from clear. Absent better ones we shouldn't be relying on evidence like EPI's---a study of career colleges' high graduation rates that was supported by the Imagine America Foundation, formerly the Career College Foundation, established in 1982 as the research, scholarship and training provider for the nation's career colleges. Full-text of that study wasn't even placed online for researchers to fully vet!

Community colleges have a long, rich history of serving this nation. Sure, there's room for improvement, but without more solid evidence of which changes are needed let's not jump to conclusions and tout the for-profits as a model to which they ought to aspire. We might end up in a bigger mess than we're already in.

POSTSCRIPT:

I have now obtained a copy of the full EPI report. My suspicions were correct: the authors use nothing more than simple descriptive comparisons of students' characteristics and degree completion rates (calculated using NCES's DAS system, likely without propering weighting) to support their causal claims about the "benefits" of attending community college. For example, they write "The report suggests that career colleges work harder to provide appropriate student services and support" but present no data on institutional services or effort expended, particularly any tied to student outcomes. Their final conclusion -- "statistically, not only do students attending career colleges perform as well as or better than many other students attending comparative public institutions, but they persist in and complete their education while typically being more economically, educationally and socially challenged than other students"-- is based on nothing more than comparisons of sample means (no regression, no nothing). C'mon folks, this ain't the kind of research any consumer ought to be taking seriously. Glad to see Kevin Carey agrees.

0 Big Man on Community College Campus

TIME recently crowned 10 college presidents (nearly all men) the "best" in the nation. The article spurred the usual pushback against "top 10" lists and raised questions about the criteria used, but a notable aspect of the list hasn't drawn much attention: one of those presidents is Eduardo Padron, a community college president.

This was a smart, strategic pick on TIME's part. 2009 is the year of the community college, and while Miami Dade is exceptional in many ways (including that it's officially Miami Dade College, since it awards BAs) inclusion of a president from that sector was wise. The signals abound: the status of the public 2-year college is rising, at least in the press. And what a relief.

The role of the "snob factor" in resource allocations and overall treatment of community colleges has gone without mention for far too long. How many of us will openly praise the work of open-access institutions, while at home privately acknowledging there's no way our kids are going to these places? By casting them as institutions of last resort, schools to attend only by default, and excluding their leaders from any awards that aren't strictly focused on "do-gooders", we keep them down. It's got to stop.

So it's a pleasure to see the ambitious, audacious, strategic and smart Eduardo Padron given the credit he deserves. While the profile focuses mainly on his college's open access mission, Padron balances a commitment to that value with a continual attempt to put Miami Dade's work in the spotlight, making it central not only to education in Miami and in Florida, but to the nation. I've had the opportunity to meet him a few times this year, but on a least one occasion the chance to speak was scuttled when President Barack Obama summoned him to the White House for a meeting. Better than TIME magazine recognition for sure-- the nation's president is bringing him in for consultation and discussion. A real step in the right direction.

Next year, I hope we'll see several more community college presidents added to this list. Of course, identifying the best will require TIME to look beyond colleges possessing the most power and resources, and instead work to find those helping students excel without the benefit of all that glitters.