STEM Students in Four-Year and Community Colleges
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Crossing the Boundaries: ∗ STEM students in four-year and community colleges Hal Salzman [email protected] Michelle Van Noy [email protected] J.J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development Rutgers University August 19, 2014 John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey 30 Livingston Avenue New Brunswick, New Jersey 08901 ∗This paper draws on research funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Assistance in data analysis was provided by Matt Zeidenberg and David Hersh, to whom we are most appreciative. We also wish to thank the members of the committee on Barriers and Opportunities to 2- and 4-year STEM Degrees for their comments on earlier drafts. Crossing the Boundaries: STEM students in four-year and community colleges Introduction Four-year colleges and universities play a central role in educating the nation’s scientists and engineers. Community colleges play a key role in educating technicians who comprise the “T” category in STEM and providing the first two years of education to science and engineering students who transfer to community colleges. Aside from these commonly recognized roles, what is often overlooked is the movement to community colleges by students who begin their STEM education in four-year colleges and universities. In this paper we consider the role of community colleges for four-year STEM students as they move through their educational careers. We examine a student cohort who began their freshman year at a four-year college and the pathways that lead them to coursetaking or degrees at a community college. We identify three distinct roles of community colleges as used by four-year college students: (1) reverse transfer; (2) supplemental course taking while pursuing a four-year degree; (3) post-graduate community college coursetaking and/or enrollment. There are other variations on these three basic patterns but limited data and sample size constrain our analysis to these broader patterns. This initial analysis finds community colleges are an important education and training pathway into the STEM workforce, either directly or by way of entry into a four-year college. The dual role of community colleges for four-year students is one of a supplement or complement to their four-year degree (for concurrent enrollment/coursetaking and/or post-grad courses or certificates) and, for others, as an exit pathway through reverse transfer that can lead to an alternative education and workforce entry route through a two-year degree or certificate; however, the reverse transfer route also appears to be just a way station for some four-year students as they stop out of post-secondary education altogether. The two-year, reverse transfer alternative pathway for four-year students may be a positive option for those who find four-year schools a bad fit for their educational and/or career interests, are ill-prepared for a four-year degree, or otherwise seeking an alternative post-secondary option. Unfortunately, it also appears to be a post-secondary exit route that mirrors the race and class disadvantages in the overall education system. Understanding these different functions of two-year colleges for four-year students could enable colleges to address problems leading to drop out for some and, for others, facilitate the complementary role of two-year colleges. 1 | P a g e Background The focus in this paper on the role of community colleges for students pursuing four-year STEM degrees has emerged as a more general reconsideration of how students develop their STEM education. The prevailing notions of college STEM “production” are framed by a perspective of a “pipeline” in which there is a fixed population of high school graduates who have the academic preparation, performance, and interest necessary to pursue a STEM career. The STEM pipeline problem is defined as one of a diminishing “flow” as that population moves through the higher education system. This pipeline framework, however, suffers from a set of largely untested propositions (e.g., that there is a fixed population of STEM-eligible students that comprise the initial, freshman entry cohort; and that “flow” is unidirectional), and data limitations that have constrained the types of analyses possible. In combination, the STEM pipeline analyses tend to track only the outflow of STEM students from college entry through graduation. Further, student flows across different types of institutions, and between four-year and two-year colleges in particular, may get lost in the usual tracking of STEM students. Recent and ongoing research suggests that the pipeline perspectives have provided only a limited analysis of the STEM pathways of college students; in particular, Salzman (forthcoming) finds that, using a new, nationally representative longitudinal dataset (with oversampling of STEM students), within the cohort of four-year students graduating within six years from entry, the size of the STEM cohort changes only slightly between freshman year and graduation. In other words, although there are large attrition rates of freshman STEM majors, there is also a large STEM in-flow of students who do not start their college career in STEM majors (See Figure 1, which shows the STEM population at freshman year and graduation, tracking the STEM flows of a student cohort who start and graduate from a four-year college within six years, graduating in 2008). The S&E pathway flows shown in Figure 1 do not include students who begin in a two- year college and transfer to a four-year college; thus, community colleges provide an additional source of four-year S&E graduates, as examined in Van Noy and Zeidenburg (2014). 2 | P a g e Number of Baccalaureate S&E Freshman & Graduates [From: Salzman, 2014/working paper: “Reconceptualizing Science and Engineering pathways: An empirical analysis of college student flows”] Considering the role of community colleges in the STEM workforce leads us to consider in more detail the nature of educational pathways into the STEM workforce. As noted above, two-year and four-year pathways lead to distinctly different segments of the STEM workforce: S&E is at least a four-year degree route and technology occupations are nearly all entered through two-year or less educational routes. At the same time, there is “crossover” use of community colleges and four-year institutions by students who take courses in both institutions and those who change course by moving their enrollment between institutions. The role of community colleges in STEM pathways may be further obscured by the very use of one category under the label “STEM” to characterize these educational and occupational groups. This singular category of STEM combines disparate occupations and educational courses of study. Especially by not distinguishing between two-year and four-year STEM degrees, the STEM label increases the opaqueness of the STEM workforce and supply analysis. In the STEM category, for example, science, engineering, and math (S&E), for the most part, occupationally require four-year and/or graduate level education and it is only technology jobs for which two- year colleges are direct suppliers. To the extent that community colleges supply the S&E workforce, it is largely through its transfer function to four-year colleges. It is this supply route 3 | P a g e that Van Noy and Zeidenberg (2014) have analyzed and found that 25% of community college students who are ever in a STEM major1 transfer to a four-year college and continue to pursue a STEM major, and 10% of students “ever-in-STEM” attain a bachelor’s degree within 6 years. And, many more community college STEM students aspire to transfer to a four-year college and attain a bachelor’s degree. Among community college students, over two-thirds report they would like to attain a bachelor’s degree (Van Noy & Zeidenberg, 2014). Community colleges may also play an important role in providing education to four-year-college STEM students in a range of other, less recognized roles. Reverse transfer is often noted as those who start in a four-year and then transfer to a two-year college for any number of reasons, ranging from financial to educational (seeking a less rigorous curriculum or a more workforce- oriented education) to logistical (closer to home; to attend part time). Townsend and Dever (1999) refer to these students as undergraduate reverse transfer students; among these students they identify two groups: those students who start at a four-year college and transfer to a 2-year college, and those students who start at a four-year college and attend a 2-year college on a temporary basis, for example, during a summer session. In addition to undergraduate reverse transfer, Townsend and Dever (1999) also identify what they refer to as post-graduate reverse transfer students who take courses for a variety of reasons after obtaining their bachelor’s degree. This prior research has been limited by data availability in its ability to describe the basic characteristics of these different groups of reverse transfer students. Recent research on reserve transfer sheds some light on the issue among the general population of four-year students. Analyses of the general four-year student population based on national data indicate that reverse transfer, where students leave the four-year institution for the community college, occurred among 14.4 percent of the population, and that enrollment just for summer courses occurred among 5.4 percent of the population (Hossler, Shapiro & Dundar, 2012). Many of the students who leave the four-year school for a community college, however, eventually return to a four-year institution, though often not at the institution in which they started (Hossler, Shapiro & Dundar, 2012). Research using national survey data to examine the effects of co-enrollment in four-year and community college found that enrollment in a community college at the same time as a four-year college has a positive relationship with bachelor’s degree attainment (Wang & Wickersham, 2014).