Student Engagement and Intent to Transfer in Community College: Optimizing Community College English Learner Students' Experiences

• In Event: English Learners and Community Colleges: Preparation, Engagement, Outcomes, and Policy in an Era of Reform

Abstract

Over one third of all undergraduates in the United States attend community colleges at some point during their postsecondary careers (Snyder, de Brey, & Dillow, 2019). Multilingual students who were K-12 ever-ELs often default to community college after high school as a result of two-year schools’ tuition rates and linguistic supports, i.e., English as a Second Language (ESL) courses and development English (Kanno, 2018). In addition, these K-12 ever-ELs are joined by international students whose primary purpose for being in the US is to attend higher education and adult immigrants who enroll in ESL to improve their day to day proficiency in English. To date, little research has explored the relationships between engagement and transfer for multilingual youth in general, much less community college EL students in particular. In addition, relatively little is known about whether and how students’ linguistic status may affect campus engagement and, ultimately, their potential to transfer to a four-year institution.

The purpose of the present study is to better understand how community college EL students engage with their institutions relative to non-EL students, and what returns they may experiences from this engagement. In this study, we use data from the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE) to investigate whether and how the relationship between students’ campus engagement and intent to transfer may vary by linguistic status. For the purposes of this study, we operationalize the subset of bilingual students who complete ESL and/or Developmental English Reading and/or Writing coursework as community college EL students. We use the CCSSE 2014-2016 survey dataset, comprised of 434,288 students nested in a random sample of 701 community colleges across the U.S.

We identified three facets of student engagement to be associated with students’ intent to transfer that appear to function differently for community college EL students: 1) engagement in rigorous academic discourse, 2) engagement with diverse students, and 3) students’ support networks (outside of college staff). Specifically, we found that community college EL students who engage in academic discourse with peers and staff both inside and outside of class are 20% more likely to report that they intend to transfer thank their non-EL peers. Interestingly however, we found that community college EL students who reported interacting more frequently with students from different backgrounds appeared to be 13% less likely to intend to transfer than their non-EL peers. These findings suggest that future research will want to consider more carefully how community colleges work to engage and incorporate immigrant and EL students in order to optimize student outcomes.

Our study confirmed prior research that bilingual community college students demonstrate equal or higher educational aspirations than their native English-speaking peers (Núñez & Sparks, 2012). However, it is evident that there is still much to be learned about these students. This research contributes to the small but growing literature about how CCEL students engage at community colleges and how their interactions affect their persistence and transfer to four-year schools.

Authors

• Catherine Hartman, University of South Carolina - Columbia

• Rebecca M. Callahan, University of Vermont

• Hongwei Yu, Texas State University