Abstract
Community college near-completion students are community college starters who have accumulated a considerable number of credits but left college without any postsecondary educational credential. This quantitative study examined a nationally representative sample and intended to reveal significant predictors of becoming a community college near-completion student. We adopted Bean and Metzner’s (1985) framework to focus on characteristics of nontraditional college students and Bahr’s (2013) approach to emphasize students’ course-taking patterns. We conducted a latent class analysis to explore students’ course-taking patterns and examined whether different course-taking patterns would predict the likelihood of being a near-completion student using a logistic regression model. Findings indicated the significant role of course-taking patterns in predicting the likelihood of being a community college near completion student. Community college students who have taken and passed a large number of remedial courses are more likely to leave college without a credential. Additional interaction terms in the regression model further revealed the nuances in terms of the influences of course-taking patterns among various student sub-groups. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.
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Notes
We tested alternative thresholds at 30 credits (i.e., one-year worth of progress as suggested by Bers and Schuetz 2014) and 60 credits (i.e., two years’ worth of progress as suggested by Shapiro et al. 2014). The statistical analysis results are highly consistent between 45 credits threshold and 60 credits threshold, while the 30 credits threshold did not lead to clear course-taking patterns.
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Chen, Y., Hu, X. The Nudge to Finish Up: A National Study of Community College Near-Completion Students. Res High Educ 62, 651–679 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-020-09613-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-020-09613-9