Latina/o Reverse Transfer Students: Implications for Community Colleges

• In Event: 26.043 - Challenging the Discourse on Latinas/os in Community Colleges

Abstract

A recent national report (Hossler et al., 2012) shows students actually transfer out of four-year institutions at the exact same rate (33.1%) that students transfer into them from community colleges. This mobility includes lateral moves to other four-year institutions and reverse transfer to two-year institutions. Mobile students, however, are typically excluded from studies and accountability mechanisms because of limitations in the way data are collected and linked at the state and federal levels, causing these students to be incorrectly labeled as dropouts (Arellano, 2011; Ewell & Boeke, 2007). Consequently, very little is known the role of community colleges in educating Latina/o students who begin at four-year colleges. The purpose of this study is to understand the extent of reverse transfer among Latinas/os and examine factors associated with them taking this pathway relative to persisting at the first institution or actually dropping out of higher education altogether.

The conceptual framework guiding this study brings together student-level elements from Nora’s (2003) Student/Institution Engagement Model and institutional-level elements from Titus’ (2004) conceptual model of student persistence. Together, these two models help to explain persistence at a single institution.

Because reverse transfer is a form of system-wide persistence, it is important to test for what is already believed to positively influence the former in order to unravel the differences. Using data from the 2004 CIRP Freshman Survey matched with six-year enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, this study examined the college pathways of 10,155 Latina/o students who began college at 442 four-year institutions. Given the nested structure of the data, Hierarchical Generalized Linear Modeling (HGLM) was employed as the main form of analysis (Raudenbush & Bryk, 2002). The multinomial HGLM model compared reverse transfer to single-institution persistence as well as attrition.

Descriptive analyses demonstrate that 19.1% of all Latina/o college students who begin at four-year institutions reverse transfer within a six-year period—a figure that is higher than that of all other racial groups. When disaggregating by institutional characteristics of the origin school, it becomes evident that community colleges in the West and Midwest accommodate Latina/o reverse transfer students at larger rates. The descriptive results also show that although most transfers come from four-year campuses at the lower end of the selectivity spectrum, more than 10% of Latina/o students at the top two tiers also reverse transfer. The multivariate results suggest that for Latinas/os, the reverse transfer pathway is most uniquely associated with lower academic preparation and greater environmental pull relative to students with no departure. However, reverse transfer students very closely resembled the profile of students who dropped out, suggesting the pathway is a better alternative that can be addressed by colleges.

This work helps to challenge the discourse that all Latinas/os at community colleges are unqualified for four-year institutions. The findings have the potential to inform both two- and four-year institutions about a substantial but largely ignored population that needs attention because they are obviously committed to persisting in the higher education system and need support to accomplish that goal.

Author

• Adriana Ruiz Alvarado, University of California - Los Angeles