Hanging In, Stopping Out, Dropping Out: Community College Students in an Era of Precarity

• In Event: 52.040 - Community College Pipeline: Understanding Needs and Challenges to Improve Student Success

Abstract

Sociologists of education have documented community college students’ high postsecondary aspirations and low completion rates. Recent research suggests that community colleges can improve student outcomes by developing structural reforms, but this emphasis overlooks the ways in which students are constrained from benefiting from these reforms. Using in-depth interviews with community college students in California, I examine the factors that inhibit students’ persistence and college completion. I argue that the interplay of different levels of precarity—institutional precarity, income precarity, and precarity of care work—combine to keep students one event away from stop-out, drop-out, or failure. This article contributes to theories of student persistence by arguing that the framework of precarity complements structural explanations for student outcomes.

Author

• Beth Ann Hart, University of California - Davis