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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
Logistic Regression Analyses (Sample Weighted to Institutional Populations)
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Of course the relationships shown by the crosstabulations can be substantially inflated because they do not take into account differences among the kinds of students who attend two-year and four-year institutions. The logistic regression procedures we employed permitted us to estimate the relationship between two-year versus fouryear college attendance and changes in educational plans while statistically controlling for potential confounding influences. The results of the logistic regression analyses with the sample weighted to the institutional populations are summarized in Table 3. As Table 3 shows, the effect of two-year versus four-year college attendance on end-of-first-year educational plans became nonsignificant when potential confounding influences were taken into account. This did not hold, however, for the prediction of end-of-second-year educational plans. As Table 3 further indicates, two-year college students were significantly more likely than their four-year college counterparts to lower their lifetime educational plans below a bachelor of arts degree by the end of the second year of college. This association persisted even in the presence of controls for such confounding influences as precollege educational plans, academic ability, and academic motivation, gender, ethnicity, age, social origins, work responsibilities, full- or part-time enrollment, place of residence, college grades, and type of coursework taken.
To estimate the magnitude of the effect of two-year (versus four-year) college attendance on the lowering of educational plans we converted the logistic regression coefficients for twoyear college attendance shown in Table 3 to Delta-p, using a procedure outlined by Cabrera (1994). In the prediction of end-of-first-year educational plans the resultant Delta-p for the two-year college attendance was -.023. This means that, net of other influences in the prediction model, two-year college students are only about 2.3% more likely than four-year college students to lower their lifetime educational plans below a bachelor of arts degree after 1 year of college. In the prediction of endof-second-year educational plans, however, the estimated net effect of two-year college attendance was much larger, Delta-p = -.311. Net of other influences in the model, two-year college students initially planning to obtain at least a bachelor of arts degree were about 31% more likely than similar four-year college students to lower their lifetime educational plans below a bachelor of arts degree by the end of the second year of college.
Logistic Regression Analyses (Sample Weighted to National Populations)
Table 4 shows the results of the logistic regression analyses for the sample weighted up to the national populations. As the Table indicates, the results of these logistic regression analyses closely parallel those yielded when the sample was weighted up to the institutional populations (Table 3). When the influence of potential confounding influences was taken into account, the effect of two-year versus four-year college attendance on end-of-first year educational plans was nonsignificant. However, by the end of the second year of college two-year college students were significantly more likely than their four-year college counterparts to lower their lifetime educational plan below a bachelor of arts degree. Once again this significant association persisted in the presence of controls for all other variables in the prediction model (shown in Table 4).
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