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Variables that address student enrollment patterns (e.g., persistence, enrollment inconsistency, completed credit hours, course credit load, course completion rate, procrastination) constitute a longstanding fixture of analytical strategies in educational research, particularly research that focuses on explaining variation in academic outcomes. However, nearly all measures of enrollment patterns are handicapped by untested assumptions about a more fundamental measure, namely students' rate of progress. In this paper, I first explain how a variety of widely used measures of enrollment patterns are inextricably linked to students' rate of progress. I then describe a method of modeling mathematically students' rate of progress that employs hierarchical (multilevel) discrete-time event history analysis of repeated events. I conclude with an empirical example of the application of this method in which I test several hypotheses concerning students' rate of progress through the remedial math sequence toward the outcome of college-level math competency. In addition to the utility of the method that is proposed here, the issues discussed in this paper have important practical implications for institutional research, particularly with respect to the use of the various measures of enrollment patterns to explain variation in students' attainment.

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In this study, the author uses data from California to estimate the returns to a community college education for students who do not complete postsecondary credentials. The author finds strong, positive returns to completed credits in career and technical education (CTE) fields that are closely linked to employment sectors that are not credential-intensive, such as public safety, skilled blue collar trade and technical work, and accounting and bookkeeping, among others. In these sectors, students are able to convert the human capital acquired in their coursework into returns that far exceed the cost of the coursework itself, making some non-completing educational pathways a rational means of securing earnings gains. This finding is consistent with emerging research on skills-builder students and other segments of the community college student population who exhibit coherent patterns of course-taking and enrollment that typically do not result in a credential. These results are not without caveat, however, as the author also finds that the returns to credits are less consistent for Black and Asian students than they are for White and Hispanic students, and less consistent for female students than they are for male students, indicating the need for further investigation as well as attention to context in applying the results.

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Two related themes currently dominate discourse on open-access colleges, particularly community colleges: increasing college-going and degree attainment and improving the performance of postsecondary institutions with respect to producing graduates. Largely missing from this discourse, however, is cogency concerning the innumerable ways in which students use open-access institutions, and the ways in which students' patterns of use interact with institutional policies and practices to influence the outcomes that they experience. Absent a thorough understanding of students' pathways through the institution, the development of interventions and the adjustment of institutional policies and practices to improve students' outcomes will be more a product of guesswork than of sound empirical reasoning. Unfortunately, traditionally favored analytical approaches are unlikely to rectify this large and troubling gap in our understanding. In this essay, I present the case for a different approach - a deconstructive approach - to illuminate students' pathways and the relationships between these pathways and outcomes.

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Burton Clark's proposition concerning the cooling out of underprepared students in community colleges has a controversial history and remains a point of contention. Central to Clark's description of the cooling out process is the academic counselor, whose job it is to dissuade underprepared students from goals perceived to be overambitious and ease these students into lesser, presumably better-fitting academic trajectories. In this study, I test a number of hypotheses concerning the effect of advising on students' chances of attaining their goals. I seek to determine what effect advising has on students' attainment, and whether this effect is dependent upon students' academic preparation, students' race/ethnicity, the racial/ethnic composition of the college, or the representation of underprepared students in the college. I use hierarchical discrete-time event history analysis to analyze data that address two subsets of the Fall 1995 cohort of first-time freshmen who enrolled in any of California's 107 semester-based community colleges. I find that advising is actively beneficial to students' chances of success, and all the more so for students who face academic deficiencies, which contradicts deductions drawn from Clark's description of the active role of counselors in the cooling out process.

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Lateral transfer (between community colleges) is second only to upward transfer (to a four-year institution) among community college students’ most common patterns of transfer. Yet, upward transfer is the focus of innumerable studies, while lateral transfer has received very little empirical attention. This study explores the occurrence and frequency of lateral transfer in California and its consequences for the measurement of one particular outcome, namely, completion of a credential. The results indicate that students transfer laterally quite frequently, leading to substantial undercounts in rates of credential completion when measured from the standpoint of a single community college or single district. Furthermore, the frequency of lateral transfer varies systematically with a number of student characteristics of recurrent interest in the literature, leading to exaggerated differences in the likelihood of credential completion between some groups of students and inaccurately attenuated differences between other groups, when measured under the single-college and single-district analytical frameworks.

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The traditional unidirectional ('linear') postsecondary path from high school to a community college to a 4-year institution into the workforce represents accurately a decreasing proportion of the pathways actually taken by students through higher education. Instead, students increasingly exhibit patterns of enrollment that take them through multiple postsecondary institutions, both within levels of the higher education system (e.g. multiple community colleges, multiple 4-year institutions) and across levels (e.g. movement back and forth between community colleges and 4-year institutions). These 'swirling' patterns of enrollment are widely recognized by scholars of higher education, but they remain poorly understood. In this study, I employ data that address 89,057 first-time students in the California community college system to answer a number of key questions concerning lateral transfer between community colleges, which, according to prior research, constitutes one sizeable component of student 'swirl'. Building on the very limited work on this topic, I examine whether the reported high prevalence of lateral transfer holds true under a more stringent operational framework than that employed in prior work. I explore whether lateral transfer is primarily an artifact of students enrolling simultaneously in multiple community colleges, sometimes called 'double-dipping'. I investigate the timing of lateral transfer from several different perspectives to determine how lateral transfer fits in students' progress and development. Finally, I probe the relationship between students' level of academic investment in their current community college and the risk of lateral transfer.

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The development of a typology of community college students is a topic of long-standing and growing interest among educational researchers, policy-makers, administrators, and other stakeholders, but prior work on this topic has been limited in a number of important ways. In this paper, I develop a behavioral typology based on students' course-taking and other enrollment patterns during a seven-year observation period. Drawing on data for a population of 165,921 first-time college students, I identify six clusters of behaviors: transfer, vocational, drop-in, noncredit, experimental, and exploratory. I describe each of these student types in terms of distinguishing course-taking and enrollment behaviors, representation in the first-time student cohort, predominant demographic characteristics, and self-reported academic goal. I test the predictive validity of the classification scheme with respect to long-term academic outcomes. I investigate the relationships between the primary classification scheme and several alternative classification schemes. Finally, I demonstrate the replicability of the classification scheme with an alternate cohort of students.

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In this study, the author draws on longitudinal data for 1.1 million students in California to estimate the effects of community college credentials on students' earnings, as compared with students who are not awarded a credential. In contrast to much of the recent work on this subject, which assumed that the effects of credentials on students' earnings are constant over time, the author estimates the effects of credentials on the rate of change in students' earnings and allow these effects to vary over time.

The author finds significant earnings gains for all levels of credentials, including low-credit awards requiring fewer than six credits. Returns to associate degrees are the most durable over time, while returns to short- and long-term certificates and low-credit awards are strong initially but begin to flatten or decline by seven years after the award. The author finds substantial variability in returns by students' race/ethnicity and gender. Black men and Black women experience especially strong returns to associate degrees and long-term certificates, relative to other students of the same gender but different race/ethnicity, and men of all racial/ethnic groups experience much stronger returns to short-term certificates than do women. The author also notes wide variation by field of study in returns to credentials. The most consistent returns across levels of credentials are found in the biological sciences, engineering and industrial technologies, health, law, and public and protective services. Finally, the author finds compelling evidence of the need to distinguish returns after a credential is awarded from returns after a student has finished (or otherwise left) postsecondary education, as argued in recent work.

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Community colleges measure success by the outcomes their students achieve, in addition to the number of students they serve. However, while completion outcomes are important metrics of success, they do not measure all of the goals of community colleges. There are also significant metrics of success related to workforce development that can occur outside of the completion framework. A surprising number of first-time community college students enroll in six or fewer units, succeed in those courses, but do not complete a credential or transfer. Many of those students, particularly those who enroll in career and technical education subjects, take a coherent cluster of related courses and, as a result, attain significant wage gains.

This guide outlines research on skills-builder students in California community colleges. Through built-in discussion questions, this guide also helps relate research results to key concerns in community colleges. It is intended to support conversations on college campuses and in the policy arena regarding: how to better understand students’ goals by examining their course-taking behavior; the types of measures that are needed to improve the assessment of community college outcomes and impacts; and the potential implications and effects of current policy and institutional reform efforts.

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Measuring student success by completion rate doesn't present an accurate picture of the different postsecondary goals students have and how they plan to reach them. Using data from an earlier study, this report examines how community college students' patterns of course-taking behavior can contribute to or distract from meeting their degree, certificate, and transfer goals. The authors identify characteristics of students who exhibit these patterns and suggest that community colleges use these data to strengthen support services and interventions, especially for the disproportionate groups of students that are not successfully reaching completion.

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