Student Flow Between Community Colleges: Investigating Lateral Transfer |
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| Authors: | Peter Riley Bahr |
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| Institution: | (1) Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education, University of Michigan, School of Education, Room 2108, 610 E. University Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1259, USA |
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| Abstract: | 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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