Community College Course Content and Student Outcomes

• In Event: The Value of College Coursework

Abstract

We leverage a novel dataset on course syllabi and administrative data from Texas to study the content of courses at community colleges and its impact on student outcomes. We measure two dimensions of course content: similarity to equivalent four-year college courses and the density of labor market-relevant skills. We find that the similarity of community college courses to equivalent four-year college courses is not only driven by the community college and the four-year college individually, but also by the community college and four-year college pair, highlighting the difficulty for community colleges to match course content to multiple four-year colleges. The density of different skills differ significantly between community college courses. For example, academic courses are more likely to teach skills related to science and analysis, while technical courses are more likely to teach health and maintenance skills. We examine the effects of course content on student outcomes, and account for endogenous course selection by exploiting changes in course content across time that are unobserved to the student at course selection. For students in academic programs, a one standard deviation increase in course similarity to four-year colleges increases bachelors degree attainment by 2 percentage points and earnings by 2%. For students in technical programs, different skills affect earnings differently. Densities in health, supply chain, and economics skills increase earnings while densities in education, marketing, and science skills decrease earnings. Lastly, we explore the impact of instructor characteristics. Course content is associated with faculty characteristics: courses taught by instructors who have Ph.D. degrees or have previously taught at four-year colleges are more similar to four-year college courses but have a lower density of labor market-relevant skills. Conditional on course content, having instructors who hold PhD degrees or have taught at four-year colleges decreases transfer but increases students' post-transfer GPA.

Author

• Zhengren Zhu, Vassar College
  Presenting Author