TY  - JOUR
AU  - Carrell, Scott E
AU  - Kurlaender, Michal
TI  - Estimating the Productivity of Community Colleges in Paving the Road to Four-Year Success
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 22904
PY  - 2016
Y2  - December 2016
DO  - 10.3386/w22904
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w22904
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w22904.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Scott E. Carrell
Department of Economics
University of California, Davis
One Shields Avenue
Davis, CA 95616
Tel: 530/752-5480
Fax: 530/752-9382
E-Mail: secarrell@ucdavis.edu

Michal Kurlaender
University of California, Davis
One Shields Avenue
School of Education
Davis, CA 95616
E-Mail: mkurlaender@ucdavis.edu
M1  - published as Scott E. Carrell, Michal Kurlaender. "Estimating the Productivity of Community Colleges in Paving the Road to Four-Year College Success," in Caroline M. Hoxby and Kevin Stange, editors, "Productivity in Higher Education" University of Chicago Press (2019)

AB  - The distinct mission and open-access nature of community colleges and the diverse goals of the students they serve make it difficult to assess differences in quality across community college campuses.  In this paper, we investigate institutional differences in both the extensive and intensive margin of the transfer function across California's 108 community college campuses. Importantly, due to the richness of our dataset, we are able to adjust our estimates for a host of observed student differences, including scores on 11th grade math and English standardized tests.  Results show there is significant variation in community college quality for both the probability of transfer as well as outcomes measuring how well students perform after transferring.  Additionally, we examine whether any observable characteristics of the community college are significantly correlated with transfer productivity.
ER  -