Community Colleges and Tracking in Higher Education

Abstract

The concept of tracking has provided an important toolfor understanding stratification within educational systems and has been applied to higher education by distinguishing between two-year and four-year colleges. In this paper, we make use of a natural experiment from the open-admissions program at the City University of New York to determine whether two-year colleges function as a separate track within higher education. We compare students who applied and were accepted to four-year colleges with others who applied but were placed in two-year colleges. Controlling for differences in academic background, we find that community colleges generally deter students from attaining their educational ambitions, but the effect is modest overall and varies notably from one community college to another. From the year-by-year academic progress of students in the two different contexts, it does not appear that there are special academic hurdles in the community colleges. Rather, students placed in them appear to become discouraged over time. Thus, the community colleges at CUNY do appear to function as a separate track, but their diversity persuades us that little is known about the specific mechanisms producing a community-college effect.