Content provided in partnership with
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
Over the 2 years of the investigation the drop-out rates for the two-year and the four-year college samples differed. Two-year college students were more likely to drop out of the study than were four-year college students. (Indeed, the average response rates across the 2 years of the study were 69.68% for the four-year college sample and 54.25% for the two-year college sample.) However, no evidence indicated that the differential drop-out rates between institutional types led to any significantly greater bias by race, gender, or precollege ability in the two-year college sample than it did in the four-year college sample. Nevertheless, to adjust for potential response bias by gender, ethnicity, and institution, a sample weighting algorithm was developed for each year of the study.
- Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »
Weighted Sample. Specifically, within each of the 23 institutions participants in the followup data collection were weighted up to the institution's population by gender (male or female) and ethnicity (African American, Caucasian, Hispanic, other). (The other category consisted of Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, etc.) Thus, for example, if an institution had 100 African American men in the firstyear class and 25 African American men in the sample, each African American male in the sample was given a sample weight of 4.00. An analogous weight was computed for participants falling within each gender x ethnicity cell within each institution. The purpose of weighting the sample in this manner was to apply an adjustment for response bias, not only by gender and ethnicity, but also by institution. Thus, where necessary within each gender x ethnicity cell, two-year college students were given greater weight in the analyses to adjust for the higher drop-out rate in the two-year college sample. An analogous weighting algorithm was developed in the second year of the study that also adjusted for sample response bias by gender, ethnicity, and institution.
Because a sample based on only 23 institutions (even if representative of those institutional populations) could be biased with respect to the national populations of students in American two-year and four-year institutions, an additional weighting algorithm was developed. This algorithm weighted the sample up to the national populations of students entering American postsecondary institutions in Fall 1992 by gender, ethnicity (African American, Caucasian, Hispanic, other) and institutional type (two-year and four-year). The template for this weighting algorithm was Enrollment in Higher Education: Fall 1986 Through Fall 1994 (National Center for Education Statistics, 1996).
Table I compares the percentage distributions by ethnicity, gender, and institutional type for the weighted samples from this study and the national populations estimated by the National Center for Education Statistics. As the Table indicates, the study sample weighted up to the 23 institutional populations tended to have somewhat lower percentages of Caucasian students and somewhat higher percentages of students of color than the national populations. On the other hand the study sample weighted up to the national populations tended to have ethnic percentages by gender and institutional type reasonably close to those of the national population.
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: News
Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »