Abstract
Research often focuses on how students fail to meet college expectations, but it rarely asks how colleges fail to meet students’ expectations. This study examines students’ expectations of college and their institutional confidence—their level of certainty that college will meet their expectations. Drawing on 65 pilot interviews and a survey of 757 students in eight community colleges and two private occupational colleges, we find that students have three expectations about college. However, students do not express confidence that college will meet these expectations. Students expect college to provide: (1) dependable progress to credentials, (2) relevant courses, and (3) job contacts. Factor analyses confirm that ten survey items load onto the three components of institutional confidence expressed in the interviews. Using structural equation modeling, we investigate how institutional confidence varies by college program and its relationship to students’ overall college evaluations. Within 2-year colleges, we find that students in two occupational programs express more confidence that college provides relevant courses and employer contacts than students in BA transfer programs. Further, we find that students’ institutional confidence that college provides relevant courses mediates much of the relationship between college program and students’ overall college evaluation. We speculate about ways college programs may improve students’ institutional confidence and their evaluation of college.
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Notes
To be clear, institutional confidence is different than self-confidence. Self-confidence is related to an individual’s motivation and has been found to impact academic behaviors among community college students (Bickerstaff et al. 2012). However, this is distinct from institutional confidence, which is specifically centered on individuals’ confidence that the institution will meet their expectations.
Even though most students report being satisfied or very satisfied with their college experience, research finds a very strong relationship between level of satisfaction and remaining in college (r = .49), and the relationship remains strong and significant after extensive controls (Suhre et al. 2007).
We follow Rosenbaum et al. (2006) in using the term “occupational colleges” for colleges entirely devoted to occupational preparation. The industry sometimes calls them “career colleges,” but that implies career advancement is possible, which may not be true in some fields.
Colleges have other programs besides these three, and we discovered in interviews that many students are confused about their program. Students who we could not categorize into a program based on their survey responses are analyzed as a residual category; this group shows few significant effects.
However, for students to progress beyond certificates, occupational programs may require noncredit remedial courses and general education, similar to BA-transfer programs.
Stephan et al. (2009) performed logistic regressions predicting entry into occupational colleges versus community colleges with 37 variables and find very few significant predictors (not test scores, grades, parent SES, or race).
Although some occupational colleges offer BAs, that is rarely an exclusive emphasis. Over 88 % of students in these colleges report certificate or AA goals, sometimes in addition to BA goals (Deming et al. 2012).
All data collection procedures were in accordance with the ethical standards of our institutional review board following the Belmont Report.
In analyzing distinct, atypical institutions, we follow the lead of prior researchers who studied Catholic schools to see alternative high-school procedures (cf. Bryk et al. 1993).
This is a cross-sectional survey, which does not include students who have dropped out or transferred to other institutions. Students in our sample have mostly been in college 4 to18 months. While many students dropout that early (Horn 1999), few students transfer that early (Dougherty 1994). IPEDS data on first-time, full-time students suggest that these dropout and transfer trends are true for our 10 colleges. If we were able to include such students, we might see a stronger associations between institutional confidence and program because it is likely that those who left these colleges prior to our survey were dropouts who likely have less confidence than transfers. If we had been able to include them, we would likely have more dropouts (with low confidence) in the program with the least confident students (BA-transfer) and fewer transfers (with more confidence). As a result, we may underestimate the associations between institutional confidence, college program, and college evaluation.
We originally expected that students in occupational programs and occupational colleges did not plan to earn BA degrees. This is mostly mistaken; we find that most students under age 25 in occupational colleges (89.4 %) and occupational programs (68.5 %) plan to get BA degrees, although many also have interim degree goals. Including students who plan to attain less than a BA does not substantively change the findings.
One might worry that BA-transfer students are substantially less concerned about whether their college experience is career relevant and will provide job contacts. Although these students are hoping for BA degrees, our survey finds that BA-transfer students are similar to students in the other two programs with regards to their interest in jobs. When asked on our survey, 68.8 % of BA-transfer students report “getting a better job” as their primary or secondary reason for being in college, which is similar to results for occupational program and occupational college students (73 and 71.7 %, respectively; differences not significant).
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Rosenbaum, J.E., Becker, K.I., Cepa, K.A. et al. Turning the Question Around: Do Colleges Fail to Meet Students’ Expectations?. Res High Educ 57, 519–543 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-015-9398-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-015-9398-3