| Sara Goldrick-Rab
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Investigating path dependence in postsecondary education transitions
FINAL REPORT:
Pathways through the broad and widely differentiated American higher education system are changing. The transition from high school to college is now only one of many transitions students make--following initial entry to postsecondary education, students must pass through a series of transitions in order to achieve success in the form of a bachelor's degree. Among students seeking a bachelor's degree, these transitions occur as they achieve credit thresholds, advancing from freshman to sophomore, sophomore to junior, and junior to senior, progressing toward the degree. At those junctures students make critical decisions about the pace of their progress: whether to enroll for sufficient credits to ensure timely completion, or to enroll for fewer credits, or whether to leave school for a limited period of time or probably altogether. These decisions accumulate to produce heterogeneous patterns of degree completion, and in particular lengths of time to degree completion.
This study investigated postsecondary transitions among students entering four-year colleges using postsecondary transcript data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988. What happens to students between the entry into college and their graduation or non-graduation is of central interest to policymakers as well as scholars of education. Our analysis argues for a cumulative view on postsecondary attainment and provides evidence of the importance of path dependencies in students' college careers, the independent effects of socioeconomic background on transition outcomes, and social differentials in path dependence.
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