Examining the Educational and Employment Outcomes of Reverse Credit Transfer in Texas

• In Event: New Perspectives on the Labor Market Benefits of Nontraditional Community College Credentials

Abstract

Purpose

Reverse credit transfer (RCT) awards associate’s degrees to students who transfer from 2-year to 4-year colleges after transfer. Although research has found that students receiving associate’s degrees through RCT are more likely to persist and complete a degree at their university (Authors, 2019), no study has estimated the relationship between receiving an associate’s degree through RCT and students’ labor market outcomes. The purpose of this study is to estimate the impact of RCT degree receipt on students’ university and labor outcomes using data from Texas, which began implementing RCT statewide in 2011.

Theoretical Frameworks

Human capital theory would suggest students make college attendance and persistence decisions based on perceived costs and benefits of their education (Becker, 1993; Tinto, 1975). Awarding students an associate’s degree after university transfer could decrease persistence but bolster labor outcomes if the associate’s degree has labor market value. However, receiving the associate’s degree may affirm that students are able to succeed in college and therefore increase the likelihood of persistence, particularly for low-income and first-generation students (Cohen, Brawer, & Kisker, 2014).

Methods/Data

Data for this study comes from the Texas Education Research Center (TERC) at the UT-Austin, which houses Texas’ longitudinal student data system. The sample includes students who enrolled at community college, earned either 15 (n=14,019) or 30 (n=11,187) credits prior to transferring in the fall 2011 or spring 2012 semesters, did not earn an associate’s degree prior to transfer, and did not transfer back to a community college during the study timeframe. Roughly 20% of each sample received an associate’s degree after transferring, which is the dichotomous independent variable. A technique that uses estimated propensity scores to create propensity-weighted estimates of the “treatment effect” (called augmented inverse probability weighting) was used to estimate the relationship between receiving the associate’s degree and a variety of outcomes, including bachelor’s degree attainment and/or continued enrollment, employment, and earnings.

Results

We find post-transfer associate’s degree recipients are significantly more likely to persist and attain degrees in universities compared to their peers who were eligible for RCT but did not receive the associate’s degree. However, we find limited evidence of additional benefit of the associate’s degree on labor outcomes beyond the effect on increased baccalaureate attainment, and limited employment benefits for university stopouts. We suggest this may be due to the majority of associate’s degrees awarded through RCT being academic or transfer-oriented degrees rather than degrees with greater alignment to the labor market.

Significance

While RCT aims to bolster the labor outcomes of students who have earned enough credits for an associate’s degree but stopout of higher education, our results suggest students derive limited economic benefits from the degree. Supplementary analyses show the most common degree awarded through RCT is in liberal arts/general studies, which does not always confer significant labor market benefits (Schneider & Rooney, 2017). However, students receiving the degree are more likely than peers to attain a bachelor’s degree, so there is limited risk and empirical benefits to promoting RCT.

Authors

• Matt Giani, The University of Texas at Austin

• Jason L. Taylor, University of Utah

• Sheena Kauppila, Coastal Carolina University