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Predictors of College Attendance Patterns of Rural Youth

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Abstract

This study investigated patterns of college attendance using data from a nationwide and contemporary sample of 2112 rural youth. We found that more than half of rural youth attended two-year institutions at some point during their college career and about a fourth initially enrolled in a two-year college before enrolling in a four-year college. Results also revealed that parental education, college preparatory track and preparation experiences, and teacher expectations predicted students’ college attendance patterns. Our findings point to the importance of two-year colleges and highlight the influence of family characteristics and students’ schooling experiences in the postsecondary trajectories of rural youth.

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Notes

  1. In other words, we were unable to request records for 975 out of 8754 students because of missing information regarding students’ birthdays and names.

  2. It is important to recognize measurement errors in NSC data in that they tend to underestimate the college enrollment rate particularly for for-profit-colleges and minorities (Dynarski et al. 2015). As a result, it is unknown to what extent rural students enroll in for-profit-colleges, and it is likely that we underestimate the college enrollment rate particularly for the minority students in our sample. Indeed, although our estimate of the college enrollment rate among rural high school students using NSC data [i.e., approximately 60% (4702 out of 7779)] cannot be directly compared with estimates by other studies using different data, it appears to be lower than the college enrollment rate estimated by recent research. Specifically, using data from the Educational Longitudinal Study, Irvin and his colleagues (in press) estimated that 70% of high school sophomores (in the spring of 2002) in rural schools enrolled in college (29% for a two-year; 41% for a four-year college) within four years (i.e., spring of 2006) after high school graduation. In short, we acknowledge the limitation of identifying students enrolled in college through NSC data.

  3. Supplementary analyses suggested that the proportion of White and female students and the average level of parental education were higher among these identified students compared to the original national sample of high school students. While we expected some discrepancies because the sample recovered by NSC included only original study participants who were enrolled in postsecondary institutions between 2009 and 2013, we acknowledge that our results likely reflect demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of these identified students.

  4. A separate study is underway to examine rural students in the sample who were not enrolled in college at the time of follow-up data collection.

  5. χ 2 or t tests are usually used to examine the bivariate relationship among variables, but there is no consensus on how combine χ 2 or t test results across imputed data sets. Therefore, we used regression approaches to test differences. Meanwhile, χ 2 or t test results for each of the imputed dataset are available from the authors.

  6. Some literature (e.g., Rubin 1987; von Hippel 2005) suggests that accurate results can be obtained from two to ten imputations. However, other literature (e.g., Johnson and Young 2011) suggests that the minimum number of 25 imputations is needed for more stable estimates especially with small sample sizes and large amounts of missing data. We followed this more conservative recommendation for our multiple imputations. Analyses revealed that imputed values were reasonable compared to observed values and that results using listwise deletion were similar to what we report in the current paper, using multiple imputations.

  7. Researchers are beginning to question the community college penalty assumption. For a recent analysis, see Dietrich and Lichenberger (2015).

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by funding from the Spencer Foundation (Reference No. 201300107) and the Institute of Educational Sciences, U.S. Department of Education (Grant No. #R305A04056). Soo-yong Byun also acknowledges support by Population Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health (R24HD041025). The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the granting agency. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of American Educational Research Association, April 16–20, 2015, Chicago, IL. The authors thank Bryan Hutchins for his assistance with data management.

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  1. Department of Education Policy Studies, The Pennsylvania State University, 302F Rackley Building, University Park, PA, 16802, USA

    Soo-yong Byun

  2. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Judith L. Meece & Charlotte A. Agger

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  1. Soo-yong Byun
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Appendix 1

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Table 4 Correlation matrix of variables used in the analysis
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Byun, Sy., Meece, J.L. & Agger, C.A. Predictors of College Attendance Patterns of Rural Youth. Res High Educ 58, 817–842 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-017-9449-z

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