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Literature on Transfer Benchmarks and College Partnerships

Despite the critical role of the community college to 4-year college pathway as a route to baccalaureate attainment, neither the federal government nor most states collect data on the performance of 2- and 4-year colleges in enabling community college students to transfer and earn bachelor’s degrees. According to a College Board report on student transfer, “community colleges and four-year institutions are rarely acknowledged for the work they do on behalf of transfer, and where transfer-related metrics exist, they are often imprecise, inadequate, or misapplied” (Handel & Williams, 2012, p. 59). Under the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) student right-to-know statistics, to which all institutions whose students receive federal financial aid are required to contribute, community colleges report the rate at which students transfer to 4-year institutions. However, these statistics have been criti 234 Community College Review 46(3) cized because of the variation in the methods by which institutions track transfer students (Albright, 2010).

Merely tracking transfer rates does not give an indication of how many transfer students succeed in earning bachelor’s degrees. Transfer students are not included in the statistics that 4-year institutions report to IPEDS but some 4-year institutions voluntarily report on the baccalaureate success of their transfer students through the Student Achievement Measure (SAM).2 Yet, SAM is neither comprehensive of all undergraduates at 4-year institutions nor inclusive of community college outcomes on transfer student bachelor completion.

As a part of the College Scorecard data,3 released in September 2015, the federal government published institutional performance metrics for student transfer and completion among federal financial aid recipients at community colleges and 4-year institutions. However, as discussed in the accompanying technical report (Office of the President, 2015), the College Scorecard transfer and completion metrics are admittedly weak measures of institutional performance, given problems with data quality prior to 2012 (namely, institutional misreporting on Pell-only aid recipients), an estimated 70% accuracy in placing students into starting cohorts, and the bias of a student sample limited to solely financial aid recipients.

Some state higher education agencies periodically look at transfer outcomes, but generally, like the federal government, their accountability measures do not include transfer students. For example, a 2013 review of performance funding in eight states that are considered to be national leaders in such policies found that only two— Missouri and Tennessee—include measures related to successful transfer from 2- to 4-year institutions. In both cases, the measures apply to community colleges, not 4-year institutions (Dougherty & Reddy, 2013).

General Literature on Determinants of Baccalaureate Success

As we will explain in more detail in the methodology section, our article uses an input adjusted approach that examines the performance of a transfer partnership between a 2-year and a 4-year college in graduating transfer students within this particular partnership, controlling for student characteristics and fixed institutional characteristics. The first step toward input-adjusted institutional comparisons is to identify key institutional characteristics that have an impact on baccalaureate graduation rates and should be adjusted in the model.

Researchers have developed extensive empirical literature to explore the impact of individual and institutional factors on baccalaureate graduation rates. These factors generally fall into one of the three major categories: financial variables, student composition variables, or fixed institutional variables. Existing studies focusing on financial variables typically use expenditures, such as per full-time equivalent (FTE) expenses, to measure institutional resources and generally identify a significantly positive impact of greater expenditure on graduation rates (e.g., Hamrick, Schuh, & Shelley, 2004; Ryan, 2004; Scott, Bailey, & Kienzl, 2006), highlighting the importance of adjusting for the resource levels in evaluating and comparing college performance.

Student compositional variables include gender and race composition, selectivity, and socioeconomic status (SES) indicators for an average student in an institution. Measures of institutional selectivity and academic capacity of the student population are consistent and significant predictors of graduation rates across studies (e.g., Cunha & Miller, 2009; Goenner & Snaith, 2004; Mortenson, 1997). Although not as strong predictors as selectivity, other student demographic characteristics are generally found to be related to graduation rates. Specifically, colleges with higher percentages of female students and lower percentages of ethnic minority students are associated with higher baccalaureate graduation rates (e.g., Goenner & Snaith, 2004; Scott et al., 2006).

Fixed institutional variables include variables such as location of the college and program emphasis. Researchers have included a variety of institutional characteristics in analyses of determinants or correlates of graduation rates, and the most important predictors include whether the college is private or public; religiosity of the college; the college’s location in an urban, suburban, or rural area; and college program emphasis. Researchers (e.g., Mortenson, 1997; Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991, 2005; Scott et al., 2006) found that private and religious institutions (e.g., Catholic colleges) tend to have higher graduation rates, and such an advantage persists even after controlling for student selectivity and resource availability. However, the impacts of institution location are less consistent in the literature, with some studies finding a higher graduation rate at a more urbanized location (e.g., Scott et al., 2006), whereas others (e.g., Goenner & Snaith, 2004) finding the opposite. Finally, program emphasis is particularly critical in evaluating baccalaureate attainment rates among transfer students in community colleges. Given the diverse missions that community colleges assume, many students enrolled in occupation-oriented programs may not seek transfer to a baccalaureate institution (Xu, Jaggars, & Fletcher, 2016). Because institutional-level data typically do not provide information on the educational intention of the students, failure to take into account program emphasis of an institution may unfairly punish 2-year colleges that have a heavier occupation rather than transfer focus.

Studies Focusing on Transfer Partnerships and Success

Much research on transfer students has focused on the student experience of transfer and less on the institutional structures, policies, and practices that promote degree attainment by community college transfer students (Bahr et al., 2013). Extensive research has been done on the difference in probability of completing a bachelor’s degree starting at a community college and transferring versus starting at a 4-year institution (Alfonso, 2006; Doyle, 2009; Gross & Goldhaber, 2009; Leigh & Gill, 2003; Long & Kurlaender, 2009; Melguizo & Dowd, 2009; Roksa & Keith, 2008; Rouse, 1995; Sandy, Gonzalez, & Hilmer, 2006; Xu et al., 2016). Very few studies have sought to estimate the effects of individual pairing between a 2- and a 4-year institution on transfer student bachelor completion rates.

One such study was conducted by Ehrenberg and Smith (2002), who developed a model that includes fixed effects for the sending and receiving institutions to estimate 236 Community College Review 46(3) how each institution differentially affected transfer student outcomes. Using data on a sample of students who transferred from the State University of New York’s (SUNY) 2-year schools to its 4-year institutions, these researchers ranked 2-year SUNY’s institutions based on how well each 2-year SUNY’s institution was preparing its students to transfer to public 4-year institutions in the state. They similarly ranked 4-year institutions based on how successful each 4-year college in the state was graduating students from 2-year colleges who transferred. They found that transfer students from different 2-year SUNY’s institutions appeared to have different probabilities of completing their 4-year degrees and of dropping out within 3 years after transfer. Similarly, students who transferred to different 4-year SUNY’s institutions had different probabilities of completing a bachelor’s degree. Ehrenberg and Smith argued that their methodology “could be used either in summative evaluations that relate to resource allocation decisions, or more preferably, in formative evaluations in which knowledge of the best practices of the most successful institutions are transmitted to their sister institutions in the state” (p. 3).

In a more recent study of community college transfer performance, Carrell and Kurlaender (2016) tracked multiple cohorts of former high school students who subsequently enrolled at California’s community colleges and transferred to one of the California State Universities (CSUs). The authors measured community college performance with transfer in two ways: How productive the college was at transferring its students to one of the CSUs and how successful the college’s transfer students were in completing bachelor’s degrees? Adjusting for student and institutional inputs, the authors found that some of the community colleges were more effective than others at both transferring students to CSUs and preparing their transfer students for success. The authors also found small positive associations between these measures of success and community colleges that had larger student populations and were located closer to a CSU. That study did not account for the effects of practices by CSU institutions in enabling transfer students to earn a bachelor’s degree.

In 2016, the Community College Research Center (CCRC), the National Student Clearinghouse (Clearinghouse) Research Center, and the Aspen Institute published a report that addressed the lack of comparable measures of institutional performance with respect to transfer students. The report also introduced measures for community college and 4-year institutions (Jenkins & Fink, 2016). Specifically, using studentlevel data from the Clearinghouse on a cohort of degree-seeking students who started higher education in a community college, the authors calculated rates of transfer to 4-year institutions (vertical transfer rate), rates at which transfer students transferred with a community college award (transfer-with-award rate), and bachelor’s completion rates for vertical transfer students (transfer bachelor’s completion rate) as measures of community college and 4-year institutional performance. The authors found that 33% of entering, degree-seeking community college students transferred to a 4-year college, and only 14% completed a bachelor’s degree within 6 years.4 Average performance did not vary much by the type of community college students first attended; instead, there were larger differences in average completion rates based on the type of 4-year transfer destination in favor of more selective colleges, public colleges, and colleges serving higher SES students. The study also showed wide variation in individual institutional performance as well as wide variation in average performance by state.

Although the Ehrenberg and Smith (2002) and Carrell and Kurlaender (2016) studies, and the study conducted by the Jenkins and Fink (2016) have taken important initial steps toward measuring how different institutions influence students’ transfer outcomes, these studies focused separately on the performance of 2- and 4-year institutions, leaving unstudied the effectiveness of partnerships between pairs of 2- and 4-year institutions. Students who transfer have to navigate through both types of institutions.