How to Compare Persistence Rates Between Community College Transfers and First-Time Freshmen

By

James Ssemakula

Associate Director

Analytic Studies Division

CSU Chancellor’s Office

Long Beach, California

Contact: Philip Garcia

SeniorDirector

Analytic Studies Division

CSU Chancellor’s Office

Presented at CAIR, November 2003, Sonoma.

Recently the California State University (CSU) participated in a Consortium for Student Retention Data Exchange (CSRDE) initiated (beta) survey of the retention and persistence of California Community College (CCC) transfer students. The survey is similar in content to other CSRDE surveys of first-time full-time freshmen (FTRs), and FTRs enrolled in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) majors.

A common feature among CSRDE reports is that, in general, they all list cumulative graduation and continuation rates for a given cohort at a given campus – differing only in the cohort of students that are tracked. Whereas all other surveys concern only FTRs at entry, the one on CCC Transfers contains both part-time and full-time students. Details of the surveys are at the CSRDE website:

With the availability of these data, it is tempting, especially for executive decision-makers and the media to make direct comparisons of persistence rates between CCC transfer students and native first-time freshmen. Direct comparisons would give one the false impression that native CSU FTRs lag behind CCC transfers in graduating, or that their graduation rates are lower that those of CCC transfers.

However, such direct comparisons are inappropriate because these two groups of students are quite different in several ways. CCC transfers have had the benefit of up to 2 years of post-secondary education and survived that experience, prior to enrolling at CSU. They have also had opportunity to develop useful collateral skills: e.g. time-management, good study habits, ability to navigate the education bureaucracy of institutions of higher learning, and so on. These advantages essentially translate into earlier graduation for transfers compared to FTRs.

For example, 10% of CCC transfers graduate 2 years after CSU matriculation, while it takes a little over 3 years for 10% of FTRs to do so. Similarly, after 3 years 30% of CCC transfers have graduated, but FTRs take 4 years to get to this milestone. Likewise, it takes just over 5 years for 50% of CCC transfers to graduate, but FTRs take nearly 6 years to get to this mark. It takes 12 years for 60% of the FTRs to have graduated, but less than 7 years for CCC transfers to do so.

To make meaningful comparisons of persistence rates of the two groups it is necessary to equalize the first-time freshmen to CCC transfers. In this study, this was done by constructing a cohort of students who had survived two years of college instruction at CSU from among those admitted in the fall of 1986. This cohort is known here as the ‘Equalized FTR’.

When compared to the 1988 cohort of CCC transfers, the Equalized FTRs were found to have performed much better over ten years, with graduation and persistence rates of 78% and 79% respectively; compared to 66% and 68% for CCC transfers.

On refining the cohort of CCC transfers to include only upper division transfers, the rates of transfers improved slightly to 68% graduation and 69% persistence.

It was observed that there is a considerable variation in the high school graduation date among CCC transfers. On the other hand, such variation is almost absent in the cohort of native FTRs admitted in the fall term on any year.

A final refinement of the cohort of CCC transfers, selected only those with a high school graduation date of 1986. This group of CCC transfers, known here as the “Elite CCC Transfers”, was presumed to have spent exactly 2 years in a CCC before transferring to CSU, and were therefore more similar to CSU students in this respect. This raised persistence rates to 74% graduation and 79% retention, which is closer to those of the Equalized FTRs of 78% and 79% respectively.

From the foregoing, it can be concluded that that there were virtually no differences in persistence rates between Equalized FTRs and the Elite CCC Transfers, at the level (system-wide) investigated here. Note that all CCC Transfer groups in this study contained both full-time and part-time students.

Campus, gender and ethnic-specific differences in persistence rates were not investigated here. Further, in most cases, one should exercise caution when comparing rates across ethnic groups. This is because rates for minority ethnic groups are likely to be unstable, across time on a given campus, as they are based on small sample sizes, by definition of a minority group.

The accompanying Power Point Presentation summarizes this discussion and includes graphical comparisons of persistence rates between groups identified above.

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