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Postsecondary Co-enrollment and Baccalaureate Completion: A Look at Both Beginning 4-Year College Students and Baccalaureate Aspirants Beginning at Community Colleges

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Abstract

Research examining diversifying college enrollment patterns has gradually gained attention in recent years. Yet, few studies have focused on postsecondary co-enrollment and its different forms such as co-enrolling at institutions of the same level (lateral co-enrollment) and attending a 4- and 2-year institution simultaneously (vertical co-enrollment), and their distinctive relationship with baccalaureate completion and college persistence. Drawing upon data from the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study (BPS:04/09) and the Postsecondary Education Transcript Study (PETS:09), this study investigated the relationship between co-enrollment and baccalaureate completion and college persistence among beginning 4-year institution students and baccalaureate-aspiring beginning community college students who first accessed postsecondary education in 2003–2004. Results indicated that vertical co-enrollment appeared to have a positive relationship with baccalaureate attainment and persistence among students beginning at 4-year institutions as well as baccalaureate-aspiring community college beginners, while lateral co-enrollment did not demonstrate a significant association with attainment and persistence across both student groups. Policy implications and suggestions for future research are also discussed.

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Notes

  1. It is important to distinguish between postsecondary co-enrollment and high school/college dual enrollment. Co-enrollment signifies attending more than one postsecondary institution simultaneously (Crisp in press; Peter and Forrest Cataldi 2005; Wang and McCready 2013). High school/college dual enrollment also involves attending multiple institutions at the same time; however, in that scenario, students are enrolled at a high school and a postsecondary institution (Bailey et al. 2002). This study focuses solely on the phenomenon of postsecondary co-enrollment.

  2. See Lam (2007) as an exception, though the author used the term “co-enrollment” not only to refer to attendance at more than one postsecondary institution but also high school-college “dual enrollment.” Grouping these types of simultaneous enrollment together may have revealed results that are not accurate for or applicable to co-enrollment specifically at the postsecondary level.

  3. We should also note that our sample includes all BPS participants who fit our sample restriction. Thus, after weighting, our sample is nationally representative of all traditional age students who started at a public or private nonprofit 4-year college and their counterparts who began at a public 2-year community college with the expectation to earn a bachelor’s degree. Thus, our sample is inclusive of co-enrolled and non-co-enrolled students, as well as those who transfer institutions and those who do not.

  4. We acknowledge the imperfect measure of educational expectations, as they can be fluid and students do not always follow paths in alignment with their educational expectations.

  5. Although we considered employing the terms upward co-enrollment and downward co-enrollment, we did not wish to attach any potentially negative attributes to the postsecondary institutions students use to navigate higher education (e.g., moving “downward” to a community college). In order to maintain a neutral connotation, we decided to utilize vertical co-enrollment, which speaks to the fact that the type of co-enrollment that involves both 2- and 4-year colleges as a phenomenon is vertical in both directions, despite students’ primary institutions.

  6. A double-looping search method was utilized to create cross matching of the student term records from different institutions. It should be noted that students' term records from the same institution were not cross matched, for the records from the same institution are not co-enrollment records. In addition, summer co-enrollment at an institution other than students’ primary institution was included in the counting of co-enrollment as long as both enrollments occurred simultaneously. For example, if a student was enrolled at a 4-year college and took one single course in the summer at a community college at the same time, the student was classified as being vertically co-enrolled.

  7. See column V of Table 4: 15 + 43 + 15 % = 73 %.

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by a 2012–2013 Fall Research Competition Grant awarded by the Graduate School Research Committee at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Alexander McCormick and two anonymous reviewers of Research in Higher Education provided helpful comments on earlier drafts of the paper.

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  1. Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 270-H Education Building, 1000 Bascom Mall, Madison, WI, 53706-1326, USA

    Xueli Wang & Kelly Wickersham

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Correspondence to Xueli Wang.

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Wang, X., Wickersham, K. Postsecondary Co-enrollment and Baccalaureate Completion: A Look at Both Beginning 4-Year College Students and Baccalaureate Aspirants Beginning at Community Colleges. Res High Educ 55, 166–195 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-013-9317-4

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