Students at two-year community colleges are less likely to earn a bachelor’s degree than students at four-year colleges, especially when students with similar educational backgrounds are compared.
Researchers Jonathan Smith, with the College Board, and Kevin Stange, with the University of Michigan, set out to discover why that is. Smith and Stange revealed their results in a new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
They found that peer effects explain half of the gap between the rate students at community colleges and four-year colleges earn bachelor’s degrees. Having smart people around a student makes it easier for that student to graduate, and being surrounded by bad students can bring down the odds that the same student will graduate.
Barriers that make it difficult to transfer schools also explain part of the gap. Those barriers include the inability to transfer courses to the new school as well as the time and money associated with applying to a new school and moving to a new home.
Smith and Stange also believe that students who are the same academically in high school might have different career plans that lead them to pick different types of schools.
To compare students of equal academic background, Smith and Stange used scores on the Preliminary SAT. They also controlled for spending by the school, tuition, student age, portion of part-time students and size of a school.
Jason Russell is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
