Success in Community College: Do Institutions Differ?

Community colleges are complex organizations and assessing their performance, though important, is difficult. Compared to 4-year colleges and universities, community colleges serve a more diverse population and provide a wider variety of educational programs that include continuing education and technical training for adults, and diplomas, associates degrees, and transfer credits for recent high school graduates. Focusing solely on the latter programs of North Carolina’s community colleges, we measure the success of each college along two dimensions: attainment of an applied diploma or degree; or completion of the coursework required to transfer to a 4-year college or university. We address three questions. First, how much variation is there across the institutions in these measures of student success? Second, how do these measures of success differ across institutions after we adjust for the characteristics of the enrolled students? Third, how do our measures compare to the measures of success used by the North Carolina Community College System? Although we find variation along both dimensions of success, we also find that part of this variation is attributable to differences in the kinds of students who attend various colleges. Once we correct for such differences, we find that it is not possible to distinguish most of the system’s colleges from one another along either dimension. Top-performing institutions, however, can be distinguished from the most poorly performing ones. Finally, our adjusted rates of success show little correlation either to measurable aspects of the various colleges or to the metrics used by the state.     

New Destinations,New Trajectories? The Educational Progress of Hispanic Youth in North Carolina

Since 1990, Latin American immigrants to the United States have dispersed beyond traditional gateway regions to a number of "new destinations." Both theory and past empirical evidence provide mixed guidance as to whether the children of these immigrants are adversely affected by residing in a nontraditional destination. This study uses administrative public school data to study over 2,800 8- to 18-year-old Hispanic youth in one new destination, North Carolina. Conditional on third-grade socioeconomic indicators, Hispanic youth who arrive by age 9 and remain enrolled in North Carolina public schools close achievement gaps with socioeconomically similar White students by sixth grade and exhibit significantly lower high school dropout rates. Their performance resembles that of first-generation youth in more established immigration gateways.     

Interracial Contact in High School Extracurricular Activities

Using data from yearbooks for 193 high schools, this study examines the degree of interracial contact in 8,849 high school teams and other organizations. More than one-third of these groups were all-white, while only about 3% were exclusively nonwhite. Owing in large part to their overall numerical preponderance, white students rarely found themselves outnumbered in groups by as much as three to one; by contrast, nonwhites often were in this position. Tabulations show that the degree of interracial exposure was typically less than what would occur if all organizations in each school had been racially balanced and was much less than the exposure that would have occurred if all organizations reflected the racial composition of the schools containing them. Whereas the nonwhite percentage of the students enrolled in the sample high schools was 24.9%, the membership of clubs and teams was 20.7%, reflecting a lower rate of participation by nonwhites. Furthermore, because the racial compositions of clubs and teams were not uniform, the average white member was in an organization that was only 15.3% nonwhite. Although clearly less than its theoretical maximum, this rate of contact nonetheless appears to be much higher than what would occur if friendships were the only vehicle for interracial contact outside the classroom. Finally, the extent of segregation associated with these organizations was the same or less in the South than in the rest of the country.     

Teacher credentials and student achievement: Longitudinal analysis with student fixed effects

We use a rich administrative dataset from North Carolina to explore questions related to the relationship between teacher characteristics and credentials on the one hand and student achievement on the other. Though the basic questions underlying this research are not new—and, indeed, have been explored in many papers over the years within the rubric of the “education production function”—the availability of data on all teachers and students in North Carolina over a 10-year period allows us to explore them in more detail than has been possible in previous studies. We conclude that a teacher's experience, test scores and regular licensure all have positive effects on student achievement, with larger effects for math than for reading. Taken together the various teacher credentials exhibit quite large effects on math achievement, whether compared to the effects of changes in class size or to the socio-economic characteristics of students.