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Classifying Community Colleges Based on Students’ Patterns of Use

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Abstract

In this study, I draw on Bahr’s (Research in Higher Education 51:724–749, 2010; New Directions for Institutional Research S1:33–48, 2011) behavioral typology of first-time community college students to examine college-level variation in students’ patterns of use of 105 community colleges in California. I find that students’ patterns of use vary greatly across the colleges, and, further, these patterns tend to cluster in such a fashion that colleges may be classified based on dominant or disproportionate patterns of use. Using k-means cluster analysis, I identify five types of community colleges, including Community Education Intensive, Transfer Intensive, Workforce Development Intensive, High-Risk Intensive, and Mixed Use. I describe each of these community college types and then investigate whether the patterns of student use that characterize the identified types appear to be primarily a consequence of institutional policies and practices or, conversely, a product of localized community demand and the associated circumstances and choices of the students who attend a given college. The evidence, though limited, tends to support the latter: variation in patterns of student use across institutions appears to be primarily a product of localized community demand. Finally, I draw on established performance indicators to examine the implications of the identified patterns of student use for observed institutional performance. I find that institutions that differ in terms of dominant or disproportionate patterns of student use also differ significantly and systematically on a number of measures of institutional performance.

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Notes

  1. This point is debated by some (e.g., Bers 2006).

  2. Students who were enrolled in more than one community college in the fall semester of 2001 were assigned to the college in which they enrolled in the most credits of coursework or, in the absence of for-credit coursework, the most noncredit courses.

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Acknowledgments

The author thanks Tom Bailey, Sandy Baum, Nate Johnson, and the other participants in the conference on “Context for Success: Making Sense of Institutional Differences in Student Backgrounds, Quality, and Cost” for their respective contributions to the development and refinement of this work. Work on this study was funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation through a grant to HCM Strategists.

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  1. Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education, School of Education, University of Michigan, Room 2108, 610 E. University Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109-1259, USA

    Peter Riley Bahr

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Correspondence to Peter Riley Bahr.

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Bahr, P.R. Classifying Community Colleges Based on Students’ Patterns of Use. Res High Educ 54, 433–460 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-012-9272-5

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