Study Shows Faculty Conversations Are What Keep Community College Students on Track

Schudde, L. (2019). Short- and long-term impacts of engagement experiences with faculty and peers at community colleges. Review of Higher Education, 42(2), 385–426. https://doi.org/10.1353/rhe.2019.0001

Introduction

Community colleges serve as a critical gateway to postsecondary education, yet completion rates remain troubling: 46 percent of students who enroll at two-year public institutions drop out within three years (NCES, 2011), and within six years, only 14 percent earn an associate’s degree while 12 percent transfer to a four-year institution (NCES, 2011). Prior research suggests that engagement with faculty promotes persistence, but whether these interactions actually move measurable academic outcomes remains empirically unresolved. Schudde (2019) set out to answer that question with the rigor the field had been missing.

Methods

The author drew on the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study (BPS: 04/09), a nationally representative dataset of 7,010 first-time students attending public two-year institutions. Four first-year engagement experiences were examined: social contact with faculty, academic contact with faculty outside of class, study group participation, and club participation. To address the well-documented problem of selection bias, in which students most likely to succeed are also most likely to engage, Schudde employed propensity score modeling, estimating each student’s probability of engaging based on detailed demographic, financial, and academic background characteristics. Propensity score-weighted regression models then produced conservative estimates of engagement’s causal effects on first-year GPA, second-year retention status, associate degree attainment, and transfer to a 4-year college or university.

Results

Schudde (2019) tested the impact of four engagement experiences on achievement, retention, degree attainment, and transfer to a four-year college. Across experiences, academic contact with faculty proved most impactful, showing significant positive effects on retention and degree attainment. Club participation and social contact with faculty (non-academic in nature) showed minimal impact in comparison. The results indicate that not all student engagement is created equal, and the most academically consequential interactions a community college student can have is with faculty.

Discussion

Schudde’s findings confirm that prior correlational studies likely overstated the benefits of peer-focused activities. Once students’ propensities to engage were properly accounted for, only faculty academic contact retained large, consistent effects across both short- and long-term outcomes. The author also found that financial support predicted engagement across all four experiences, suggesting that students without financial resources may be economically strained and less likely to access the campus interactions that support persistence.

Implications for Mentoring Programs

These findings carry direct relevance for mentoring program design at community colleges. If academic conversation with faculty is the single most productive engagement experience available to students, then structured mentoring programs should prioritize creating deliberate, low-barrier opportunities for that contact, not merely social events or peer study circles. Programs serving first-generation and financially constrained students in particular should consider how financial aid, flexible scheduling, and intentional faculty outreach can remove the structural barriers that prevent the most vulnerable students from having the conversations that most reliably move outcomes.

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