Extending the Promise: Student Experiences with Evolving Supplemental College Promise Programs

Recently Published Dissertations on Community and Junior Colleges

Who should take college-level courses? impact findings from an evaluation of a multiple measures assessment strategy

Given the low price of community college relative to need-based aid, last-dollar “free community college” (i.e., Promise) programs often only marginally reduce students’ real costs. Given this reality, some claim that these programs impact students largely through “messaging”: information conveying the affordability of community college. However, it is unclear how such messaging works in concept or practice. Drawing on a case study, I document the paradoxical ways last-dollar community college Promise programs alter students’ understanding of college affordability. Reflecting program marketing, students typically understood the program as simply “free college,” with little grasp of last-dollar structure or eligibility criteria. Many believed the Promise program paid their tuition, but administrative data showed the program funded very few students. Student misunderstanding of the program is traceable to a baseline conception of college as “expensive” and to a tenuous grasp of need-based aid. Promise programs’ “messaging effects” are predicated upon such prevalent misconceptions. The “message” is a mixture of clarification and misdirection, revealing a factual situation (that community college is often “tuition-free”) through an equivocation (that the Promise program is making it free).

This paper describes a summit on Community Colleges in the Evolving STEM Education Landscape organized by a committee of the National Research Council (NRC) and the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and held at the Carnegie Institution for Science on December 15, 2011. This summit followed a similar event organized by Dr. Jill Biden, spouse of the Vice President, and held at the White House in October 2010, which sought to bring national attention to the changing missions and purposes of community colleges in contemporary American society.1 The NRC/NAE event built on the White House summit, while focusing on the changing roles of community colleges in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. An in-depth summary of the summit was prepared by the NRC and NAE for publication in late Spring 2012 by the National Academies Press (NRC and National Academy of Engineering, 2012 ). This paper provides a synopsis of that report, which is available at www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13399, and emphasizes how we can use the report to improve STEM education for our students, but also how much progress still needs to be made to realize this ideal.

To explore how field experiences can be designed to engage more community college students, the Undergraduate Field Experience Research Network (UFERN) held a "community conversation" (Community Colleges in the Field: Successful Programs and Strategies) on 15 October 2021. The hour-long virtual meeting featured a panel of instructors who are involved in creating opportunities for community college students to learn in field environments. The goal was to offer insights and foster a conversation about successful strategies, unique challenges, and concrete practices for participants to use in their classes, programs, or institutions. Forty-one people from field stations and marine laboratories, community colleges, and various public universities from within the United States participated in the community conversation. Undergraduate field experiences (UFEs), where student learning occurs in nature, can take a variety of forms, from field laboratories embedded within on-campus courses, day-long or multi-day field trips, weeks-long residential field courses to paid research internships (O'Connell et al. 2021). Undergraduate field experiences of a variety of formats are associated with a litany of positive outcomes and are perceived as critical pathways to career and graduate opportunities in the field-based sciences (Petcovic et al. 2014, Fleischner et al. 2017, Klemow et al. 2019). For example, field courses for undergraduates are associated with higher major retention rates (in this case Ecology and Evolutionary Biology), and the narrowing of achievement gaps for underrepresented minority (URM) students (Beltran et al. 2020). In addition, students participating in field courses tend to graduate with higher GPAs and show gains in their sense of scientific self-efficacy (Beltran et al. 2020). Patrick (2010) found that field trip experiences strengthened students' understanding of process of science and positively influenced students' attitude toward biology. A field-based research experience was shown to also increase student self-efficacy and feeling of belonging in their discipline, in this case the geosciences (Kortz et al. 2020). However, UFEs are not equally accessible to all interested students and can be laden with unique barriers to entry, particularly for URM students and students from low socioeconomic backgrounds (Morales et al. 2020, Zavaleta et al. 2020, Flowers et al. 2021, O'Connell et al. 2021). For community college students, these challenges are magnified and accompanied by institutional-specific barriers (Hewlett, 2018). Community college students make up a large portion of the undergraduate student population in the United States. In the 2019–2020 academic year, an estimated 7.7 million students (around 35% of U.S. undergraduates) attended community colleges (US DOE 2020a). Almost half of all students graduating with a STEM degree in 2020 had attended community college at some point; however, degree completion and transfer rates for community college students remain low, especially in STEM fields (Zhang 2021). Students starting in community college switch out of STEM majors at higher rates than students who start at 4-year universities (NASEM 2016). Of students entering community college in a STEM program over a 7-year study period, 69% left, either by switching to non-STEM programs or leaving college altogether in comparison with 48% for 4-year college students (Chen 2013). Further, the probability of attaining a bachelor's degree in a STEM field was more than four times higher for students starting at a 4-year institution compared with students starting at 2-year institutions (Wang 2015). The student populations of 2-year institutions are typically far more diverse than their 4-year counterparts. United States community colleges serve higher percentages of URM students (US DOE 2020b), students over the age of 24 (US DOE 2020c), low-income students (US DOE 2016), students working more than 30 hours per week (US DOE 2016), first-generation college students (US DOE 2016), and students who are parents (Noll et al. 2017, Reed et al. 2021). Given the broad and well-established benefits for students who participate in field experiences, and an urgent need to increase the inclusion and retention of a diverse student population in the natural sciences, it is valuable to target interventions, such as field research programs and field-based courses, at the community college level. Amanda Robin is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and the director of the Community College Field Biology Alliance (CCFBA). The CCFBA is an all student-run organization established in 2018 that provides community college students with the opportunity to design and enact research projects with ecological and animal behavior components. Cohorts of interns from 15 community colleges in the greater Los Angeles area are assigned a graduate and an undergraduate student mentor. Over 9 months, the teams move through the entire scientific process from exploring the literature, developing a hypothesis, experimental design, data collection and analysis, and the presentation of a research poster. Additionally, interns attend monthly workshops aimed at providing practical skills. Community college students are recruited to apply for the program through advertisements at their home campuses. Over the past 4 years, the CCFBA has developed a contact list of community college deans, department chairs, faculty, academic counselors, and STEM program administrators. On a yearly basis, recruitment materials are sent via email to this list. In addition, the program has also developed more formalized working relationships with STEM programs at several 2-year institutions nearby to the UCLA campus. These institutions incorporate direct links to the program application on their undergraduate research websites and facilitate more extensive recruitment outreach. Occasionally, they facilitate information sessions and have provided supplemental funding to support their students' CCFBA programming. Each year the number of applications received has increased and the program currently averages about 60 per cycle, of which 10–15 students are accepted. The CCFBA does not have any course prerequisites or GPA requirements and prioritizes accepting interns to the program with no previous research experience. This is considered a program strength in that it provides access to research for a broad range of students. The CCFBA programming aims to provide a foundational experience upon which students can build, and purposefully seeks students who may not otherwise be ready for larger, more competitive research experiences. The CCFBA attempts to increase program accessibility through the extended nature of the program's timeline. By requiring small monthly time commitments over 9 months, interns can maintain outside commitments while engaging with research. The program emphasizes exposure to the scientific process over the resulting research product, allowing interns to scale back the scope of their projects when needed. This emphasis provides the flexibility necessary to tailor the experience to the needs of individuals. Alongside research experiences, the CCFBA also provides transfer-student-focused programming, including Q&A panels with graduate students who are former community college students and one-on-one support with application preparation. Further, each intern's undergraduate mentor is a transfer student. Graduate student mentors attend a workshop prior to starting the program that provides an overview of the transfer process. The CCFBA has found challenges in the areas of interpersonal support for interns, maintaining accessibility, ensuring mentor engagement, and sourcing funding. Holistically supporting interns and ensuring accessible programming is a key goal but poses challenges. Many interns have actively struggled with food and housing insecurities and/or faced personal or familial health crises while in the program. The program found it challenging as a student organization separate from where the community college students live and attend college to aid with personal crises. In response, the CCFBA has attempted to balance program rigor with the flexibility required to make the program realistically completable for the highest number of interns. Students do not receive course credit because of the logistical challenges of arranging this with each student's college, as each cohort comes from multiple individual institutions. Additionally, the quality and quantity of engagement from mentors has been difficult to standardize. More time spent communicating leadership expectations and the unique needs of community college students to mentors has mitigated some of these challenges. Finally, it has been a struggle to obtain funding that would support the expansion of the program in key ways, such as the provision of stipends for interns. Currently, a majority of program funding is secured through grants from student associations at UCLA. The average cost per intern for a remote program is ~200 dollars (USD), and the cost per intern during in-person programming is ~600 USD. All programming is provided at no cost to the community college students. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, program meetings were held in person and included a trip to a field station managed by the University of California Natural Reserve System ~2 hours outside of Los Angeles to collect data. Two cohorts have now been completed remotely with fieldwork conducted in the interns' neighborhoods. Technologies like Zoom and communication applications like Slack have helped to facilitate an engaged online community. This program model has proven to be flexible and could likely be successful in any location, even in areas with distinct seasons, as it designed to have data collection focused in the summer months. Furthermore, there is potential to use open-source ecological data sets or data collected by remote sensors if the prospective program needs to be conducted during times when weather may be unsuitable for outdoor field research or students are unable or unwilling to conduct research outside. While working remotely has presented challenges in maintaining student engagement, assisting interns with data collection, and providing the appropriate equipment for them to safely do so, there have been benefits. Remote programming has highlighted the synergy between ecological field research and online internships for community college students by enabling a higher number of interns to participate, securing guest speakers that otherwise would not have been able to speak in person, and making our program open to those unable to travel (regardless of pandemic restrictions). Further, conducting fieldwork within their own communities illuminates for interns that ecological fieldwork is not something only reserved for "far off" places. Alison Varty is a faculty member and chair of the Environmental Science major at College of the Siskiyous, a publicly funded community college in a rural California mountain town. Like most community college students, those at College of the Siskiyous struggle to fit traditional field experiences (summer field classes or extracurricular activities) into their schedules due to their responsibilities outside of school. To address this challenge, Professor Varty integrated field experiences into several credit-based classes offered during the academic year. Further, she instituted a requirement for students in the Environmental Science major to complete a discipline-related science research or work-related project prior to graduation. Most students fulfill this requirement through for-credit field experiences. Their work has included internships at the local research station (Castle Lake Research Station), the Shasta-Trinity or Klamath National Forest, local native plant nurseries, private forestry companies, and at the local fish hatchery. These kinds of field experiences are popular because they often lead to long-term employment. Professor Varty has reached an even broader audience by creating hybrid and fully online courses that include field experiences. Her hybrid field botany course engages students in the study of plants through online asynchronous activities, including autonomous asynchronous field trips. During these trips, students take weekly excursions on their own to collect plants to practice keying using commercially available field guides and to perform floral or fruit dissections. In addition, students attend four all day face-to-face, synchronous group field trips. These trips complement the asynchronous work by helping students learn to identify plants they encounter in the field and providing them with hands-on experience collecting overstory and understory plant community data using quadrat and point-centered quarter sampling, respectively, that they later analyze and summarize on their own. Varty also teaches a fully online environmental science class, which involves many field-based laboratory activities. She has observed that field laboratories can actually be more equitable than traditional "cookbook" laboratories, because all students can get outside to a school or park or lawn, whereas not every student may have the required supplies (e.g., measuring spoons) in their home. James Hewlett is a Professor of Biology at Finger Lakes Community College (FLCC) in Canandaigua, New York. In 2001, FLCC conducted an internal study to better understand the barriers to developing Undergraduate Research Experiences (UREs) and potential strategies for establishing an undergraduate research program. The study uncovered several interesting and unanticipated hurdles to establishing an undergraduate research program at a community college that were unrelated to the oft-cited financial barriers or ill-prepared students. For example, the weak connection between community colleges, external networks, and science researchers was found to be a serious barrier. The results were compiled and used to create a model for integrating research experiences into a community college. After an initial rollout at FLCC, these principles were tested at six partner institutions with support from the National Science Foundation. The result was the establishment of the Community College Undergraduate Research Initiative (CCURI) in 2007. Community College Undergraduate Research Initiative is currently a national network of 142 community colleges in 39 states and two countries focused on the development and implementation of undergraduate research programs. The CCURI model, which was originally constructed to address barriers at FLCC, has been modified and expanded for implementation throughout the CCURI network. In its current form, the CCURI model incorporates solutions to the known barriers to integrating research into the student experience at community colleges. The CCURI model involves three levels. The first, "Engage," aims to immerse students in research from the moment they enter the classroom as freshman and is designed to promote conceptual understanding while also exposing students to ongoing CCURI research projects. Student-centered activities are used to teach basic scientific concepts within the context of an ongoing research project. The second level of the program is called "Explore." After engaging students in research questions as part of the freshman courses, the CCURI model creates opportunities for students to explore those questions in greater depth. These opportunities allow the students to continue these projects as a part of embedded regular course offerings at the college (CUREs; Course Undergraduate Research Experiences), a degree program (PURE; Program Undergraduate Research Experience), or as part of a credit-bearing summer experience (SURE; Summer Undergraduate Research Experience). The third component of the CCURI model, "Connect," involves connecting community college faculty and students to larger research communities. The growing CCURI network has become a rich source of collaboration on both the curricular and research sides of the CCURI model. At this level, students are connected to research opportunities and prospects to transfer their experience to a four-year institution as they continue to pursue their STEM career. Community College Undergraduate Research Initiative has built a nationwide network of community colleges who are committed to offering undergraduate research experiences at their home institutions. Community College Undergraduate Research Initiative partner institutions can access a suite of course curricula and professional development opportunities focused on student research. Further, the CCURI team shares data from meta-analyses of CCURI institutions as a way to develop best practices that can be shared both inside and outside the network. The goal is to continue to broaden participation in undergraduate research at our nation's community colleges. Jimmy Lee is an associate professor at East Los Angeles College, a large community college located near downtown Los Angeles that serves a primarily Hispanic and Asian student population. During a summer when he was not teaching, Prof. Lee participated in the Research Experience for Teachers (RET) program at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL). The RET program embeds teachers from community colleges within research teams to strengthen the scientific expertise of teachers and create lasting partnerships between educators and NSF-funded researchers. Following his RET experience, RMBL hired Lee to serve as its Education Program Coordinator. This is part of a RMBL initiative to recruit URM students by engaging with faculty from community colleges. RMBL has spent many years networking with community college instructors like Prof. Lee to build a pipeline that attempts to prioritize the recruitment of URM students for their summer research program. These connections result in roughly 15% of the 40 students in the undergraduate research program being composed of community college students each year. Professor Lee has found that community college students are often unaware of the benefits associated with participating in large, funded research internship programs, such as those provided by the National Science Foundation's Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU). He finds that sharing stories and testimonials is an effective strategy to engage community college students and expose them to the potential advantages of applying to these types of opportunities. In these conversations, he talks about his own experience as an RET program participant at RMBL. Lee's work highlights how RET and REU programs can work in tandem to achieve greater diversity in participation. In addition to sharing his own experiences, he also invites past REU students from RMBL to talk with prospective students about their research projects and overall experience. Seeing and hearing from peers who have successfully participated in these programs provides students with strategies that they can then incorporate into their own academic trajectories. Community conversation participants' questions focused on (1) the concrete challenges of funding—who receives funding, and from what sources, and (2) anticipating and responding to students' needs in the field or at field stations. Specific program funding sources: Field research and learning experiences are important teaching and developmental tools for retaining students in STEM fields. Providing these experiences for community college students presents some unique challenges. Presenters in the UFERN Community Conversation spotlighted examples of how their institution, organization, or classes addressed these challenges. A major challenge discussed was students' family, community, and job commitments, which make participation in long-duration traditional field and research programs difficult. College of Siskiyous responds to these obstacles by providing course credit for students' internships or field experiences that take place in the community where they live. The CCFBA attempts to address this issue by spreading the research and workshop commitment over 9 months, which keeps the time required for any one activity more manageable. The CCURI program offers students opportunities to engage with research in a variety of ways from classroom-based experiences, summer long trips, and full degree programs. Further, CCURI found that there was insufficient communication between community colleges and research institutions. They responded by creating a network for community college faculty and administrators interested in providing research experiences to their students and connecting them to larger academic research networks. Another challenge participants noted was that "research" as a concept can at times feel alien and intimidating to students, or that students may not think participating in research is possible for them. Prof. Lee encouraged community college faculty to discuss the benefits and accessibility of formal programs like REUs with their students, and provide information, encouragement, and support to students who might not otherwise consider these experiences. Where possible, faculty are encouraged to share their own or past students' first-hand accounts of research program participation to normalize the experience. Further, offering local opportunities for students to engage in research that is connected to the student's community or location can help increase accessibility of field-based learning and highlight the potential relevance of conducting fieldwork for students. Lastly, funding is a critical challenge for programming success. Community college students overall do not typically have the same financial resources as students at 4-year colleges. Any program that hopes to have community college student participants should take the financial needs of students into serious consideration when designing programming and establishing expected time commitments and when travel is required be prepared to offer funding at, or above, the level provided to students from 4-year colleges before the program begins. Looking toward the future, research institutions and field stations should consider creating authentic partnerships and connections with community college campuses. Community college faculty and administrators can award credit for field-based internship or work experiences, and/or they can connect with national networks like CCURI to introduce research experiences to their own campuses. Faculty are encouraged to experiment with course formats to include fieldwork in students' own neighborhoods, group field trips, and even overnight excursions. Research groups at 4-year institutions like the CCFBA, as well as field stations, can work to provide students with flexible and accessible longer, mentored research experiences. Programming that is specifically designed to be thoughtful about the unique barriers community college students face will benefit the field as whole by fostering the early careers of this currently underrepresented student population in our broader community of scholars. This paper was initiated based on a high degree of interest from the UFERN community in engaging community college students in field learning experiences. We thank all the participants in the 15 October 2021 Community Conversation and other conversations at UFERN network meetings for inspiring this paper. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under RCN-UBE grant no. 1730756 to K. O'Connell, A.R. Berkowitz, G. Bowser, and J. Branchaw.

To explore whether community college (CC) applicants were a significant contributor to the diversity of matriculants to physician assistant (PA) programs and whether CC applicants were less likely to matriculate to PA programs than non-CC applicants. The authors used national data from the 2016-2017 application cycle. They categorized applicants to PA programs into 5 pathways: HS-CC (applicant attended CC while in high school), first-CC (applicant attended CC before a 4-year university), 4Y-CC (applicant attended CC while at a 4-year university), post-CC (applicant attended CC after graduating from a 4-year university), and no-CC (applicant never attended CC). The authors used Pearson chi-square and Kruskal-Wallis H tests and the appropriate post hoc tests to assess whether applicants in the 4 CC pathways were more diverse in terms of their race, ethnicity, gender, rurality, and socioeconomic status than those in the no-CC pathway. They used logistic regressions to assess associations between the CC pathways and matriculation to a PA program. Among the 8,577 matriculants in the 2016-2017 application cycle, more than 75% attended a CC at some point. First-CC and post-CC matriculants were more likely to be Black (P < .001) or Hispanic (P < .001) and come from a disadvantaged background (P < .001) than no-CC matriculants. After adjusting for applicant demographics, academic performance, rurality and socioeconomic status, and application strategy, first-CC applicants had 17% lower odds of matriculating to a PA program than no-CC applicants (P < .001). CCs are an important pathway to the PA profession, with 3 of 4 matriculants having a CC background. However, lower matriculation rates among similarly qualified applicants who transferred from a CC to a 4-year university than among applicants with no-CC background suggest that PA programs are missing important opportunities for increasing student diversity and thereby the profession.

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates community college transfer success by exploring the relationship between individual and institutional-level characteristics at students’ two- and four-year institutions. Using statewide administrative data from North Carolina, this study employs a cross-classified multilevel model to investigate the impact that a student’s community college and four-year transfer institution have on post-transfer success. Our findings offer important and compelling insights into the relationship between transfer students, the community college they attended, the four-year transfer institution, and educational outcomes. While individual effects were small, we find several institutional factors associated with student success. Attendance at a large community college or having a public university in the same county as their community college is positively associated with student success, whereas size of the university is negatively related to grades during the first year and persistence to the second year. While the four-year institution’s selectivity is negatively related to many of our outcomes, transferring to a Historically Black College or University is positively associated with GPA, college persistence, and degree completion.

How Does the 15 to Finish Initiative Affect Academic Outcomes of Low-Income, First-Generation Students? Evidence from a College Promise Program in Indiana

The college promise – or free college – movement is rapidly expanding throughout the United States; however, there is much to learn about community colleges’ organizational responses to promise programs and corresponding partnerships with nonprofit organizations that are involved in some programs. Using institutional logics to frame this qualitative case study, I explored one community college district’s relationship with a nonprofit promise program partner, and revealed the ways in which this community college district preserved and blended their dominant logics with that of their nonprofit partner. The findings from this study shed light on community college professionals’ perceptions of promise programs, their organization’s response, and the college’s relationship with their nonprofit partner. Findings revealed that individual community college actors used dominant community college logic to make meaning of their partnership and maintain their commitment to the community college mission despite blending logics through incorporation of practices associated with dominant nonprofit logics. These findings have implications for the roles of community colleges and nonprofit partners in the implementation of college promise programs, as well as considerations for community college leaders.

Rosenbaum, J. E., Deil-Amen, R., & Person, A. E. (2006). After Admission: From College Access to College Success. New York: RussellDOI: 10.1177/0091552108327071After Admission: From College Access to College Success examines student and college success from an organizational structure perspective and argues that problems students experience during their academic journey can be minimized by using intentionally supportive procedures and processes. To demonstrate how private occupational colleges minimize barriers that students experience, authors Rosenbaum, Deil-Amen, and Person compare and contrast public, accredited 2-year community colleges from a large metropolitan area with private occupational colleges that offer accredited associate's degrees in the same occupational fields. The authors compare the practices of these institutions with regard to support structures and services they provide to aid in student success. This book is written from the perspectives of three educators: a professor of sociology, education, and social policy (Rosenbaum); an assistant professor of education (Deil-Amen); and a doctoral candidate in human development and social policy (Person). More than 190 authors and works are referenced in this book, making it a rich compilation of both quantitative and qualitative research results.Recognizing that the United States has moved toward universal access for college, as exemplified by the open-access policy of community colleges, the authors identify methods to help community colleges reshape practices and processes in a contextrelevant manner. Because these students at these institutions tend to be the first in their families to attend college, their lack of knowledge about college culture as well as their need to develop soft skills can have negative implications for their success. These challenges, combined with socioeconomic strain, demands outside of college, and the need for realistic graduation timelines, all play a role in student success or failure. The authors argue that student characteristics have changed dramatically yet institutional processes have not. Specifically, Rosenbaum, Deil-Amen, and Person challenge community colleges to abandon the concept of individual student deficiencies as a prime reason for student failure and to consider institutional, structural, and procedural changes as a potential avenue to reverse the dismal success rate of community college students.The authors dispute the notion that community colleges engage in a cooling-out process while also demonstrating how warming up does not necessarily serve students well in the absence of appropriate support structures. They question the nonstigmatizing approach mat is often used in today's community colleges with regard to remediation, suggesting that ineffective information leads to confusion for students who are not aware that they may not earn degree credit in remedial courses. According to personal testimonies, students sometimes unknowingly enrolled in noncredit remedial courses only to learn after a semester or more that the courses in which they were enrolled did not fulfill graduation requirements. For students with limited financial resources, this constitutes a devastating misunderstanding.A variety of additional topics are explored in the volume, including problems community college students face regarding the amount and delivery of needed information, students' lack of social and cultural capital, community colleges' limited and ineffective use of advisory boards to support programs and student connections, minimal career services, and a lack of adequate institutional commitment for job placement services. Comparisons between the two types of institutions are made, indicating that private occupational colleges structure their student support services in a way that minimizes these challenges for their students. Although private occupational colleges work from a charter-building perspective, which helps them build beneficial connections for their students, community colleges rely on the traditional, credential concept with little regard to the market value of degrees and the additional needs of their graduates. …

According to Venezia, Kirst, and Antonio (2003) and Barth’s 2002 Thinking K16 Ticket to Nowhere report, the disconnect between K-12 and postsecondary education was a contributing factor to high attrition rates. Since mathematics emerged as a primary concern for college readiness, Barth (2002) called for improving student transitions from K-12 to postsecondary institutions through the use of state or local data. The purpose of the present study was to analyze mathematics course-taking patterns of secondary students in a local context and to evaluate high school characteristics in order to explore their relationships with Associate degree attainment or continuous enrollment at an urban community college. Also, this study extended a national study conducted by Clifford Adelman (The Toolbox Revisited, 2006) as it specifically focused on community college students that were not included his study. Furthermore, this study used the theoretical framework that human capital, social capital, and cultural capital influence habitus - an individual’s or a group’s learned inclination to behave within the parameters of the imposed prevailing culture and norms. Specifically, the school embedded culture as it relates to tracking worked as a reproduction tool of ultimate benefit for the privileged group (Oakes, 1994). Using multilevel analysis, this ex post facto study examined non-causal relationships between math course-taking patterns and college persistence of public high school graduates who enrolled at the local community college for up to 6 years. One school-level variable (percent of racial/ethnic minorities) and 7 student-level variables (community college math proportion, remedial math attempts, race, gender, first-year credits earned, socioeconomic status, and summer credits earned) emerged as predictors for college persistence. Study results indicated that students who enter higher education at the community college may have had lower opportunities to learn and therefore needed higher levels of remediation, which was shown to detract students from degree completion. Community college leaders are called to partner with local high schools with high percentages of racial/ethnic minorities to design academic programs aimed at improving the academic preparation of high school students in mathematics and promote student engagement during the first year and summers of college.

The ability to complete four years of college within four years after matriculation was examined in a longitudinal study of 36,405 college students entering 246 colleges and universities as freshmen in 1961. It was found that students who do not complete four years of college come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, have lower grades in high school, and have a lower level of initial educational aspiration than do students who complete four years of college. An analysis of the effects of 36 college characteristics on student persistence in college was performed. After controlling statistically for differential student input to the various college environments, 21 significant college effects were observed. It was suggested that students are more likely to complete four years if they attend colleges where student peer relationships are characterized by friendliness, cooperativeness, and independence, where the students frequently participate in college activities, where there is a high level of personal involvement with and concern for the individual student, and where the administrative policies concerning student aggression are relatively permissive. Attrition Among College Students In the fall of 1961 a study of all entering freshmen students at a national sample of 248 colleges and universities was conducted at the National Merit Scholarship Corporation (Astin, 1965). The 127,212 students who participated in the study provided information on their socioeconomic backgrounds, high school activities and achievements, and educational and vocational aspirations. 1 In the summer of 1965 the Office of Research of the American Council on Education 2 followed up randomly selected samples of students from each of the 246 colleges and universities included in the 1961 survey. 3 Questionnaires were mailed to 60,078 of the original 127,212 students -or approximately 250 students per institution. 4 In this follow-up, data were obtained concerning the student's current educational and vocational plans and his experiences during the college years. In addition, a number of measures of the college environment were available from a follow-up questionnaire completed by 30,570 of the 60,078 students in the summer of 1962 (Astin, 1967). The data obtained from this four-year longitudinal study have made it possible for us to examine how a variety of student characteristics are related to dropping cut of college, and to estimate the impact of various features of the college environment on student persistence in college. This report presents the results of an analysis of the personal and environmental factors associated with dropping out of college. For the purposes of our study, the student's criterion status or was defined as follows: a nondropout was any student who reported in 1965 that he had completed four or more academic years of college work, whether or not he had received a bachelor's level or equivalent degree. Thus, students who'had changed colleges or had dropped out but re-enrolled and still managed to complete at least four years of college were defined as nondropouts. All other students, that is, students who left the institution they entered in the fall of 1961 and had not completed four years of college by the summer of 1965 were considered to be dropouts, even if they were enrolled in college at the time of the follow-up survey. This dichotomously scored criterion measure served as the dependent variable in the study. (Since some of the students classified as dropouts in this study will eventually graduate, and some of those classified as nondropouts will never receive a terminal degree, this study may be regarded as an analysis of the factors associated with completing four academic years of college work within the four years following matriculation.) Method The first step in the analysis of data obtained from this study was to relate the student's dichotomous criterion score (dropout or nondropout) to the precollege input data that he originally provided in the fall of 1961. An criterion score based on the student's input data was thus computed, and a residual criterion performance score obtained by removing the effect of this expected score (that is, subtracting it) from his actual criterion score. The final step in the analysis was to relate the residual criterion score (now statistically independent of input) to the various environmental characterisitcs of the institutions attended by the students. The statistical model used for computing the expected criterion score was that of linear multiple step-wise regression utilizing the com-

Promise programs are proliferating across the United States, with wide variation in their design. Using national data on 33 Promise programs affecting single, 2-year colleges, this study examines program effects on first-time, full-time college enrollments of students by race/ethnicity and gender classification. Results suggest Promise programs are associated with large percent increases in enrollments of Black and Hispanic students, especially students classified as females, at eligible colleges. Promise programs with merit requirements are associated with higher enrollment of White and Asian, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander female students; those with income requirements are negatively associated with enrollment of most demographic groups. More generous Promise programs are associated with greater enrollment increases among demographic groups with historically higher levels of postsecondary attainment.

While emphasis is often placed on assessing students' conceptual knowledge, less has been placed on investigating affective aspects of student biology learning. In this paper, we explore self-efficacy, sense of belonging, and science identity, as well as emerging assessment tools to monitor these dimensions of students' learning.

We studied the effects of academic performance, motivation, and social connectedness on third-year retention, transfer, and dropout behavior. To accommodate the three outcome categories and nesting of data within institutions, we fit a hierarchical multinomial logistic regression path model with first-year academic performance as a mediating effect. Our sample included 6,872 students representing 23 four-year universities and colleges. This work expands the current state of persistence research by (1) considering the effects of motivation and social connectedness on college persistence beyond the first year of college, (2) testing whether the effects of motivation and social connectedness on third-year retention and transfer are direct, indirect, or both, and (3) testing whether the effects of academic performance, motivation, and social connectedness are different for retention and transfer. We found that academic performance has large effects on likelihood of retention and transfer; academic self-discipline, pre-college academic performance, and pre-college educational development have indirect effects on retention and transfer; and college commitment and social connectedness have direct effects on retention. Academic self-discipline led to greater first-year academic performance, which suppressed its effect on retention and transfer. Practical and theoretical implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed.