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Does community college versus four-year college attendance influence students' educational plans?
Journal of College Student Development, Mar/Apr 1998 by Pascarella, Ernest T, Edison, Marcia, Nora, Amaury, Hagedorn, Linda Serra, Terenzini, Patrick T
An initial 3-hour data collection was conducted in the Fall of 1992, with 3,840 students from the 23 institutions participating. The data was collected using an NSSL-designed precollege survey that gathered information on student demographic characteristics and background, student lifetime educational plans, student expectations of college, and a series of items assessing the students' orientations toward learning. Participants also completed the reading comprehension, mathematics, and critical thinking modules of the Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency (CAAP). The CAAP was developed by the American College Testing Program (ACT) specifically to assess selected general skills acquired by students during the first 2 years of college (ACT, 1991). Each of the CAAP modules requires 40 minutes, and we employed a composite score based on all three tests as an estimate of a student's level of academic preparation, or aptitude, upon entrance to postsecondary education.
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The first follow-up testing of the NSSL sample took place in the Spring of 1993. This data collection required about 3 1/2 hours and included different forms of the CAAP modules, Pace's (1984,1990) College Student Experiences Questionnaire (CSEQ) to measure students' firstyear experiences in college, and a specially designed NSSL survey form assessing aspects of students' first-year experiences and lifetime educational plans not covered by the CSEQ. Of the original sample of 3,840 students who participated in the Fall 1992 data collection, 2,685 participated in the Spring 1993 follow-up, for a response rate of 69.9%.
A second follow-up testing of the NSSL sample took place in the spring of 1994. This data collection required about 2 1/2 hours and closely paralleled the first follow-up data collection. Students completed the writing skills and science reasoning modules of the CAAP, the CSEQ to measure students' second-year experiences in college, and a specially designed NSSL survey form assessing aspects of students' second-year experiences and lifetime educational plans not covered by the CSEQ. Of the 2,685 students who participated in the first follow-up (Spring 1993), 1,761 participated in the second follow-up (Spring 1994), for a response rate of 65.6%.
Testing the major hypothesis of the study essentially involved asking whether or not students, over time, lower their initial plans to obtain a bachelor of arts degree. Consequently, the sample employed in all our analyses was limited to those two-year and four-year college students who, upon entrance to postsecondary education (i.e., on the Fall, 1992 precollege testing), indicated that they planned to obtain at least a bachelor of arts degree in their lifetime. The sample was further limited to those students who participated in both the first and second follow-up data collections. Thus, the final sample was 1,645 students, 119 of whom attended the 5 two-year colleges and 1,526 of whom attended the 18 four-year colleges in the NSSL database.
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