Other Research
Dr. Bahr and his team have built an extensive body of research on foundational topics that informs their current policy-relevant research on education and economic outcomes.
Community Colleges: Origin, Evolution, Principles, and Debates
2023
Peter Riley Bahr and Jillian Leigh Gross
American Higher Education in the 21st Century, 5th Edition
https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12691/american-higher-education-twenty-first-century
In this chapter, we first discuss the origin and history of community colleges to locate the institutions as we find them today in the rich historical context from which they arose. We then discuss the five principles that have developed over time as the mainstay of modern community colleges, namely, open access, comprehensiveness, lifelong learning, community centeredness, and teaching focus. Finally, we return to and elaborate the unresolved tensions that we have mentioned here, which frame much of the current discourse on community colleges.
Topics: Other Research
How Does Undergraduate Debt Affect Graduate School Application and Enrollment?
2021
Rong Chen and Peter Riley Bahr
Research in Higher Education
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-020-09610-y
This study estimates the short- and long-term effects of undergraduate educational debt on students' decisions to apply and to enroll in graduate school after completing requirements for a baccalaureate degree, using marginal mean weighting through stratification method (MMW-S) to analyze data from the National Center for Education Statistics Baccalaureate and Beyond 2008–2012 (B&B 08-12) survey. Although we find that historically and socioeconomically disadvantaged groups tend to accumulate higher levels of educational debt, our results indicate minimal effects of undergraduate debt on graduation school application and enrollment. We find no differences by race/ethnicity, family income, or status as a first-generation baccalaureate recipient in the effects of educational debt on graduate school application or enrollment.
Topics: Other Research
Community Colleges
2016
Peter Riley Bahr and Jillian Leigh Gross
American Higher Education in the 21st Century, 4th Edition
In this chapter, we first discuss the origin and history of community colleges in order to locate the institutions, as we understand them today, in the rich historical context from which they arose. We then discuss the five principles that have developed over time as the mainstay of modern community colleges, namely, open access, comprehensiveness, lifelong learning, community centeredness, and teaching focus. Finally, we return to and elaborate the unresolved tensions that we have mentioned here, which frame much of the current discourse on community colleges.
Topics: Other Research
First in Line: Student Registration Priority in Community Colleges
2015
Peter Riley Bahr, Jillian Leigh Gross, Kelly E. Slay, and Rebecca D. Christensen
Educational Policy
https://doi.org/10.1177/0895904813492381
Across the United States, community colleges are facing severe funding reductions and surging enrollment, resulting in a condition of impaction in which demand for coursework exceeds financial or physical capacity. In turn, impaction is necessitating changes in enrollment management policies, including rapid evolution in registration priority policies, which ration access to coursework by granting preferential course enrollment timing to students who meet specified criteria. During times of impaction, such policies effectively preclude some groups of students from making progress toward their goals or, under the worst circumstances, from attending college at all. Given the importance of community colleges for providing access to postsecondary education, these policies have significant, long-term implications. Here, we situate the discourse on registration priority policies in a larger context and body of literature, document the variation in policies across the colleges in one state, and develop a set of recommendations for policy and future research.
Topics: Other Research
The Deconstructive Approach to Understanding Community College Students’ Pathways and Outcomes
2013
Peter Riley Bahr
Community College Review
https://doi.org/10.1177/0091552113486341
Two related themes currently dominate discourse on open-access colleges, particularly community colleges: increasing college-going and degree attainment and improving the performance of postsecondary institutions with respect to producing graduates. Largely missing from this discourse, however, is cogency concerning the innumerable ways in which students use open-access institutions, and the ways in which students’ patterns of use interact with institutional policies and practices to influence the outcomes that they experience. Absent a thorough understanding of students’ pathways through the institution, the development of interventions and the adjustment of institutional policies and practices to improve students’ outcomes will be more a product of guesswork than of sound empirical reasoning. Unfortunately, traditionally favored analytical approaches are unlikely to rectify this large and troubling gap in our understanding. In this essay, I present the case for a different approach—a deconstructive approach—to illuminate students’ pathways and the relationships between these pathways and outcomes.
Topics: Other Research
Classifying Community Colleges Based on Students’ Patterns of Use
2013
Peter Riley Bahr
Research in Higher Education
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-012-9272-5
This study examines college-level variation in students’ patterns of use of 105 community colleges in California. It finds that students’ patterns of use vary greatly across the colleges, and, further, these patterns tend to cluster in such a fashion that colleges may be classified based on dominant or disproportionate patterns of use. Using k-means cluster analysis, five types of community colleges are identified, including Community Education Intensive, Transfer Intensive, Workforce Development Intensive, High-Risk Intensive, and Mixed Use. Each of these community college types are defined, while the patterns of student use are identified.
Topics: Other Research
Student Flow Between Community Colleges: Investigating Lateral Transfer
2012
Peter Riley Bahr
Research in Higher Education
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-011-9224-5
The traditional unidirectional (“linear”) postsecondary path from high school to a community college to a 4-year institution into the workforce represents accurately a decreasing proportion of the pathways actually taken by students through higher education. Instead, students increasingly exhibit patterns of enrollment that take them through multiple postsecondary institutions, both within levels of the higher education system (e.g., multiple community colleges, multiple 4-year institutions) and across levels (e.g., movement back and forth between community colleges and 4-year institutions). These “swirling” patterns of enrollment are widely recognized by scholars of higher education, but they remain poorly understood. In this study, I employ data that address 89,057 first-time students in the California community college system to answer a number of key questions concerning lateral transfer between community colleges, which, according to prior research, constitutes one sizeable component of student “swirl”. Building on the very limited work on this topic, I examine whether the reported high prevalence of lateral transfer holds true under a more stringent operational framework than that employed in prior work. I explore whether lateral transfer is primarily an artifact of students enrolling simultaneously in multiple community colleges, sometimes called “double-dipping”. I investigate the timing of lateral transfer from several different perspectives to determine how lateral transfer fits in students’ progress and development. Finally, I probe the relationship between students’ level of academic investment in their current community college and the risk of lateral transfer.
Topics: Other Research
Segmentation Model for Assessing Course-Taking Patterns: Research Methodology and Discussion Guide
2012
Peter Riley Bahr, Kathy Booth, and Terrence Willett
Research and Planning Group for California Community Colleges
http://www.learningworksca.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/LW_Brief_Completion_Segment_09142012.pdf
In 2010, Dr. Peter Bahr’s cluster analytic examination of the course-taking behavior of first‐time students over an eight‐year period in the California Community College system revealed a number of interesting issues, including under‐reporting successes that do not result in “completion” (meaning transfer, an associate’s degree or certificate), equity gaps in students pursuing completion outcomes, and the high volume of units attempted by students pursuing a completion goal. While a college research office can conduct its own cluster analysis based upon local data to replicate Bahr’s study, doing so is a time‐intensive effort. As a more expedient alternative, this document provides a simplified rule set to sort students into the classifications identified by Bahr. This document also includes sample discussion questions on how to use these results to build a deeper understanding of student course‐taking behavior and its relationship to student success.
Topics: Other Research
Transition Processes of Transfer Students in the School of Education at the University of Michigan
2012
Peter Riley Bahr, Johanna C. Massé, Rebecca Christensen, Brett Griffiths, Christina Toth, Kathryn Thirolf, Christopher J. Nellum, Inger Bergom, and Malisa Lee
Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education, School of Education, University of Michigan
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3g4w2g8ugibn3se/Bahr%202012%20Transition%20Processes%20of%20Transfer%20Students.pdf
We undertook a mixed-methods study of undergraduate students in the University of Michigan’s School of Education who had transferred from a community college. The primary goals of this study were as follows: (1) determine whether community college transfer students in the School of Education experience systematic difficulties with their coursework or exhibit systematically different enrollment patterns, relative to students who attended the University of Michigan exclusively; (2) understand the experience of transition to the University of Michigan among community college transfer students in order to identify barriers to successful academic performance, personal development, and timely graduation; and (3) inform the creation of student-support infrastructure to promote the success of community college transfer students in the School of Education.
Topics: Other Research
A Typology of Students’ Use of the Community College
2011
Peter Riley Bahr
New Directions for Institutional Research
https://doi.org/10.1002/ir.415
This chapter describes a typology of first-time community college students based on students' course-taking and enrollment behavior. The utility of the typology is demonstrated through an application that involves interpreting data concerning students' participation in remedial mathematics.
Topics: Other Research
The Use of Cluster Analysis in Typological Research on Community College Students
2011
Peter Riley Bahr
New Directions for Institutional Research
https://doi.org/10.1002/ir.417
This chapter provides an introduction to the family of partitional cluster analytical methods, with specific attention to research on community college students. Key decision points and common approaches in the use of cluster analysis are described.
Topics: Other Research
The Bird’s Eye View of Community Colleges: A Behavioral Typology of First-Time Students Based on Cluster Analytic Classification
2010
Peter Riley Bahr
Research in Higher Education
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-010-9180-5
The development of a typology of community college students is a topic of long-standing and growing interest among educational researchers, policy-makers, administrators, and other stakeholders, but prior work on this topic has been limited in a number of important ways. In this paper, behavioral typology based on students’ course-taking and other enrollment patterns during a seven-year observation period is developed. Drawing on data from a population of 165,921 first-time college students, six clusters of behaviors are identified: transfer, vocational, drop-in, noncredit, experimental, and exploratory. Each of these student types are described in terms of distinguishing course-taking and enrollment behaviors, representation in the first-time student cohort, predominant demographic characteristics, and self-reported academic goal.
Topics: Other Research
Educational Attainment as Process: Using Hierarchical Discrete-Time Event History Analysis to Model Rate of Progress
2009
Peter Riley Bahr
Research in Higher Education
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-009-9135-x
Variables that address student enrollment patterns (e.g., persistence, enrollment inconsistency, completed credit hours, course credit load, course completion rate, procrastination) constitute a longstanding fixture of analytical strategies in educational research, particularly research that focuses on explaining variation in academic outcomes. However, nearly all measures of enrollment patterns are handicapped by untested assumptions about a more fundamental measure, namely students’ rate of progress. In this paper, I first explain how a variety of widely used measures of enrollment patterns are inextricably linked to students’ rate of progress. I then describe a method of modeling mathematically students’ rate of progress that employs hierarchical (multilevel) discrete-time event history analysis of repeated events. I conclude with an empirical example of the application of this method in which I test several hypotheses concerning students’ rate of progress through the remedial math sequence toward the outcome of college-level math competency. In addition to the utility of the method that is proposed here, the issues discussed in this paper have important practical implications for institutional research, particularly with respect to the use of the various measures of enrollment patterns to explain variation in students’ attainment.
Topics: Other Research
College Hopping: Exploring the Occurrence, Frequency, and Consequences of Lateral Transfer
2009
Peter Riley Bahr
Community College Review
https://doi.org/10.1177/0091552108330903
Lateral transfer (between community colleges) is second only to upward transfer (to a 4-year institution) among community college students' most common patterns of transfer. Yet, upward transfer is the focus of innumerable studies, while lateral transfer has received very little empirical attention. This study explores the occurrence and frequency of lateral transfer in California and its consequences for the measurement of one particular outcome, namely, completion of a credential. The results indicate that students transfer laterally quite frequently, leading to substantial undercounts in rates of credential completion when measured from the standpoint of a single community college or single district. Furthermore, the frequency of lateral transfer varies systematically with a number of student characteristics of recurrent interest in the literature, leading to exaggerated differences in the likelihood of credential completion between some groups of students and inaccurately attenuated differences between other groups, when measured under the single-college and single-district analytical frameworks.
Topics: Other Research
Too Much of a Good Thing: Fatal Attraction in Intimate Relationships
2008
Diane H. Felmlee, Heather Kohler Flynn, and Peter Riley Bahr
Free Inquiry in Creative Sociology
https://ojs.library.okstate.edu/osu/index.php/FICS/issue/view/564
Can a mate possess “too much of a good thing?” Here we test hypotheses concerning the propensity of individuals to view their spouse or partner as exhibiting too much of otherwise desirable characteristics. In a sample of 208 adults, we find that approximately three-fourths of respondents report that their mate exhibits “too much” of at least one appealing quality. Over two-thirds report a “fatal attraction,” in which they recount initially being attracted to the same quality in a partner that is now perceived to be exhibited in excess. Furthermore, we find that fatal attractions occur across a wide range of ages and personality dimensions, and in both dating and married relationships. We demonstrate these patterns using both quantitative and qualitative data.
Topics: Other Research
Race and Nutrition: An Investigation of Black-White Differences in Health-Related Nutritional Behaviors
2007
Peter Riley Bahr
Sociology of Health & Illness
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9566.2007.01049.x
Black-White disparities in the incidence and prevalence of chronic disease and premature morbidity are persistent and well documented in the United States. Prevailing explanations for these disparities have focused upon socioeconomic inequality and related mechanisms as the causal factors. Yet, despite the explanatory power of socioeconomic status in models of health outcomes, an unexplained racial gap in health persists. This research contributes to the study of the Black-White health divergence by exploring a mechanism with the prospect of explaining a portion of the racial gap in health remaining after adjustment for socioeconomic status. Specifically, using random coefficient regression to analyse pooled data from the 1993–1999 California Dietary Practices Survey, I identify significant differences between Blacks and Whites, after adjustment for socioeconomic status and other controls, both in global nutritional healthfulness and across a range of nutritional behaviours with established links to the development of chronic disease. Given the compelling body of literature linking nutritional behaviour to health outcomes, these differences between Blacks and Whites constitute evidence for the potential explanatory value of nutrition in future studies seeking to explain the residual racial gap in health remaining after adjustment for socioeconomic status and correlates of socioeconomic status.
Reprinted in W. Ahmad & H. Bradby (Eds.). Ethnicity, health and health care: Understanding diversity, tackling disadvantage (2008, pp. 35-59). Blackwell Publishing. http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405168986.html
Topics: Other Research
College Transfer Performance: A Methodology for Equitable Measurement and Comparison
2005
Peter Riley Bahr, Willard Hom, and Patrick Perry
Journal of Applied Research in the Community College
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ723817
Accountability in performance is a subject of increasing attention and concern for community colleges. In California, much attention has been focused on student transfers from the community colleges to four-year institutions as a primary facet of institutional performance. This focus often leads to comparisons of transfer rates between colleges with the goal of identifying low performing and high performing colleges. However, comparison of raw rates of transfer ignores important differences in the structural conditions and exogenous variables affecting the performance of each college, leading to inequitable stratification of colleges and inaccurate classification of colleges in terms of transfer performance. To treat this fundamental incomparability of raw transfer rates, a method for equitable comparison of transfer outcomes was developed and implemented in California's community college system. This method involves major enhancements to prior efforts in California to implement transfer comparisons, including a less biased definition of the transfer rate, the use of statistical models to adjust for exogenous variables observed to affect the transfer outcome, the use of multiple student cohorts, and the inclusion of data on student transfers to a wider range of four-year institutions (both private and public, and both in-state and out-of-state).
Topics: Other Research
Student Readiness for Postsecondary Coursework: Developing a College-Level Measure of Student Average Academic Preparation
2004
Peter Riley Bahr, Willard Hom, and Patrick Perry
Journal of Applied Research in the Community College
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ719978
California's community college accountability strategy, the Partnership for Excellence program, includes, as an aspect of the outcome assessment component of the program, a mechanism to "level the playing field" between colleges. This function is accomplished through adjustment models, statistically derived equations that "adjust" for observed relationships between exogenous variables and college-level outcomes of interest. The development of adjustment models for each of the several outcomes has relied upon an exploratory process to derive a parsimonious set of exogenous variables with nonzero (statistically significant) relationships to the outcome of interest. One previously unmeasured adjustment variable has received considerable interest in discussions of the adjustment model development process, namely the academic preparedness of entering students at each college. This article addresses the work of the authors to develop a measure of student average academic preparation for use in "leveling the playing field" in community college outcome measurement and accountability.
Topics: Other Research