Elsevier

Economics of Education Review

Volume 42, October 2014, Pages 93-108
Economics of Education Review

Heterogeneous paths through college: Detailed patterns and relationships with graduation and earnings

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2014.07.002Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We show detailed ways in which students pass through the postsecondary system using unique administrative data from Texas.

  • We show that transferring is highly prevalent and that transfer paths have not been adequately described by past work.

  • We show that transferring is correlated with BA receipt and earnings.

Abstract

A considerable fraction of college students and bachelor's degree recipients enroll in multiple postsecondary institutions. Despite this fact, there is scant research that examines the nature of the paths – both the number and types of institutions – that students take to obtain a bachelor's degree or through the higher education system more generally. We also know little about how enrollment in multiple institutions of varying quality relates to postgraduate life outcomes. We use a unique panel data set from Texas that allows us to examine in detail the paths that students take toward a bachelor's degree and estimate how enrollment in multiple institutions is related to both degree completion and subsequent earnings. We show that the paths to a bachelor's degree are diverse and that earnings and BA receipt vary systematically with these paths. Our results call attention to the importance of developing a more complete understanding of why students transfer and what causal role transferring has on the returns to postsecondary educational investment.

Section snippets

Data

The data used in this study are derived from three sources: Pre-K to 12th grade administrative data from the Texas Education Agency (TEA), college administrative data from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB), and quarterly earnings data from the Texas Workforce Commission (TWC). The data are housed at the Texas Schools Project, a University of Texas at Dallas Education Research Center (ERC). Unique identifiers allow us to link the data from these three sources. Thus, we can

Description of transfer behavior

Table 1 presents the distribution of transfers for both college attendees and for those who receive a BA degree within eight years of high school graduation. In the first two columns, we show this distribution for all Texas public postsecondary students. Among all attendees, 31.4% of students transfer at least once. For BA recipients, almost half of the students transfer at least once, many from a community college. Thus, transferring is relatively common, particularly among eventual BA

Conceptual model and empirical methods

The goal of the analysis in this section is to estimate the differences in postsecondary completion rates and in subsequent earnings for students who take different paths through college. Most previous studies that examine the effect of institutional quality on educational attainment and earnings measure the quality either of the first college or university one attended or of the college or university from which one graduated.17

Conclusion

With student transferring becoming more prevalent and multiple institutional contact becoming more the norm in higher education, it is critically important to understand the different paths students take through the postsecondary system and how these paths relate to college outcomes and earnings. We use detailed administrative data in Texas to examine these questions. Our data contain sample sizes that are sufficiently large to describe the very complex paths that students take, and our ability

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    We would like to thank Sara Goldrick-Rab and Jeff Smith as well as seminar participants at the 2014 American Economic Association Annual Meetings and participants at the sixth annual Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research conference for helpful comments and suggestions. This research was supported by the CALDER's postsecondary initiative funded through grants provided by the Gates Foundation and the Smith Richardson Foundation to the American Institutes for Research." The CALDER grant does not have a grant number associated with it, so this will suffice we believe. The conclusions of this research do not necessarily reflect the opinions or official position of the Texas Education Agency, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, or the State of Texas.

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