Why Community College Transfer Students Succeed in 4-Year Colleges--The Filter Hypothesis.

TLDR: This article examined the hypothesis that the community college transfer program acts as a "filter" through which potentially successful baccalaureate candidates with relatively poor high school achievement can pass, rather than as a program which strengthens marginal students through counseling and remediation.

Abstract: This study examines the hypothesis that the community college transfer program acts as a "filter" through which potentially successful baccalaureate candidates with relatively poor high school achievement can pass, rather than as a program which strengthens marginal students through counseling and remediation. If this hypothesis is correct, students at the community college should earn the same grades they would be expected to earn had they originally entered a 4-year institution. Admissions scores and college grades after 3 years were compared for two groups of students (N = 188 each) entering a senior college or a community college of the City University of New York. Analysis of covariance indicated that both groups shared a common regression line, and that dif ferences in the college achievement of both groups were due to differences in their high school admissions scores, thus supporting the hypothesis. The findings support the concept of a universal standard of grading in higher edu cation, and indicate that the community college may serve the function of screening marginal students for upper division work. EACH YEAR, thousands of high school gradu ates enter 2-year community college programs with the intent of later transferring to 4-year pro grams. By any common measure of academic achievement or potential, these students as a group are significantly less able than their con temporaries who enter 4-year colleges and univer sities directly from high school (1). The community colleges have often been criti cized for admitting large numbers of "unquali fied" students who are "successful" in competition with their low-achieving classmates, but who are unable to perform adequately when they transfer to the junior year of a "real" college. As logical as this belief is, it is not supported by the avail able facts. National data indicate that community college transfer students are extremely success ful in 4-year institutions, and a number of stud ies by individual institutions support this find ing (2). What factors are operating in this seemingly anomalous situation in which it appears that less proficient students are able to compete on equal terms with their more academically adept peers after 2 years of community college work? Two possible answers immediately suggest themselves. First, the community colleges are able, because of the distinctive nature of their mission and pro gram, to upgrade and "salvage" students whose high school preparation was initially inadequate to pursue collegiate work. The "salvage function" has been described by Medsker as ". . . affording students the opportunity to complete required courses not taken in high school, to earn grade point averages sufficiently high to demonstrate competence to do college work, and to increase basic skills in the fundamental subjects. . . ." (3) When viewed in the context of the community colleges' avowed emphasis on teaching, remedial work, and counseling, the salvage function is seen as an operation which strengthens the academic preparation of the marginal student to a level adequate to undertake collegiate work. The second possible answer is that the commu nity college transfer programs serve as a "filter" through which the proficient student passes on his way to the 4-year institution, but which prevents the unqualified from continuing. The filter hypoth esis suggests that the community college gradu ates only those students who would have been suc cessful had they attended a 4-year college in the first place. In order to understand how this filter ing can take place, even when a community college enrolls only students all of whom initially fall below senior college admissions criteria, it is nec essary to briefly review the concept of the proba bility of success in college. Using high school grades and test scores, it is possible for a college to predict with reason able accuracy the proportion of students at any achievement level who will earn passing college grades. Many colleges have done this, and have constructed probability tables which indicate, as an example, that ninety out of every one hundred students with an "A" high school average will be successful at the institutions, but that only fifty This content downloaded from 157.55.39.243 on Thu, 06 Oct 2016 05:00:44 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 248 THE JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH out of every one hundred students with a "C" i high school average will be successful. These tables reliably predict the achievement of groups of students, but inherent in them are two factors which are often overlooked. First, these tables predict probabilities for groups, and not for individuals. This means that although we can predict that only fifty out of every one hundred "C" students will be success ful, there is no way of predicting which fifty of these students they will be. Second, since the relationship between high school and college grades is far from perfect, a group of high school students selected at any achievement level will theoretically include some students who will succeed in college, and some who will fail, regardless of how high or how low their high school grades may be. The proportion of potentially successful college students in any group will increase as the average high school achievement level of the group increases, but even in a group of A+ high school students there [ will be a small percentage of college failures, and a group of D? students would have a small percentage of college successes if they were ad mitted to a college. The increased selectivity of many 4-year insti tutions means that many community colleges draw their students to a great extent from those re jected by 4-year institutions. Statistically, how ever, many of these students have the potential to do successful baccalaureate work. The filter hypothesis states that the transfer program of the community college acts as an agent for separating the potentially successful from the potentially unsuccessful 4-year college student. In order for this to take place, the community col lege transfer program must be similar in content and difficulty to the first 2 years of a 4-year insti tution. If the filter hypothesis is correct, we would expect that students in the community college transfer program would have a level of perform ance at their 2-year college which was the same as would be predicted on the basis of their high school grades and tests scores had they entered a 4-year institution.