State & Federal Reform
Community Colleges and Higher Education
We would like to thank the Lumina Foundation for Education for its generous support of this project.
Principal Investigator: Dan Goldhaber, PhD
Project Staff: Betheny Gross, PhD; Scott DeBurgomaster
Project Summary:
This project investigates several questions about how community colleges impact students’ postsecondary attendance decisions and transfer performance, and how state transfer and articulation policies affect retention and graduation rates. The results of this study will provide valuable information that is currently lacking in the higher education literature, and will help to improve decision-making at the postsecondary level.
Research Questions:
1) How do states’ established curriculum articulation and transfer agreements affect the likelihood that students graduating from high school initially opt for a bachelor’s degree pathway that begins in a two-year college?
2) To what extent do these agreements influence the likelihood that students transfer between two- and four-year colleges?
3) Do these agreements impact the selectivity of the college to which community college students transfer?
4) How do these agreements affect the probability that students who transfer from a two-year college to a four-year institution eventually receive a baccalaureate degree?
5) Based on the answers to the above questions, what can we infer about the cost-effectiveness of various state transfer and articulation policies?
Related Staff
Additional Information
View Presentation Slides:
Betheny Gross presents new research from the Community Colleges and Higher Education initiative at the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) 2009 Annual Meeting, on January 23rd in Seattle. Learn more about the event here.
