The Nudge to Finish Up: A National Study of Community College Near-Completion Students
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The Nudge to Finish Up: A National Study of Community College Near‑Completion Students Yu Chen1 · Xiaodan Hu2 Received: 25 July 2019 / Accepted: 6 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Community college near-completion students are community college starters who have accumulated a considerable number of credits but left college without any postsecondary educational credential. This quantitative study examined a nationally representative sample and intended to reveal significant predictors of becoming a community college near-completion student. We adopted Bean and Metzner’s (1985) framework to focus on characteristics of nontraditional college students and Bahr’s (2013) approach to emphasize students’ course-taking patterns. We conducted a latent class analysis to explore students’ course-taking patterns and examined whether different course-taking patterns would predict the likelihood of being a near-completion student using a logistic regression model. Findings indicated the significant role of course-taking patterns in predicting the likelihood of being a community college near completion student. Community college students who have taken and passed a large number of remedial courses are more likely to leave college without a credential. Additional interaction terms in the regression model further revealed the nuances in terms of the influences of course-taking patterns among various student sub-groups. Implications for practice and future research are discussed. Keywords Near-completion · Course-taking patterns · Latent class analysis · Community college · Students
Introduction The near-completion phenomenon refers to a sizeable diverse group of students who are almost eligible to receive a postsecondary degree, but have left college without a desirable educational credential. For public two-year institutions, nearly 20% of students began college but dropped out with no credential, despite earning three-quarters of the credits * Yu Chen [email protected] Xiaodan Hu [email protected] 1
School of Education, Louisiana State University, 113E Peabody Hall, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA
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College of Education, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL 60115, USA
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Research in Higher Education
typically required to graduate (Mabel and Britton 2018). The Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP 2011a) described the near-completion population as “the low-hanging fruit in our national agenda to increase the number of college graduates,” due to the relatively low number of credits these students would need to “move the needle” (p. 2). Supporting nearcompletion students toward credential completion is especially relevant to the community college sector given the national initiatives for community college student success, such as the completion agenda (Hughes 2012). A steadily increasing number of diverse graduates with postsecondary credentials are crucial for the skilled workforce in the United States (IHEP 2011a; National Academy of Sciences et al. 2007). However, previous re
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