Give It a Swirl? An Examination of the Influence of 4-Year Students Taking Entry-Level Math Courses at the Local Community College

Nicholas Voorhees (), Justin C. Ortagus and Erica Marti
Additional contact information
Nicholas Voorhees: University of Florida
Justin C. Ortagus: University of Florida
Erica Marti: University of Nevada

Research in Higher Education, 2023, vol. 64, issue 1, No 6, 147-173

Abstract: Abstract Roughly half of 4-year students who begin as STEM majors either change to non-STEM majors or drop out of college altogether. STEM attrition is especially disconcerting for underserved students, such as people of color or individuals from low-income families, who are significantly less likely to persist in or graduate from a STEM degree program when compared to their White or higher-income peers. Previous researchers have reported that co-enrolling at more than one institution (or swirling between institutions) can be associated with higher rates of persistence and graduation. In this study, we leverage student-level transcript data from a high enrollment, broad-access university to examine the influence of math swirling on underserved students’ academic outcomes within high-demand STEM degree programs. We find that math swirling is positively related to persistence to upper-division math courses and bachelor’s degree completion in non-STEM degree programs, but math swirling has no influence on students' likelihood of bachelor’s degree completion in high-demand STEM fields.

Keywords: Higher education; Equity; STEM; Underserved students; Low-income students; Swirling; Co-enrollment; Propensity weighting; Quasi-experimental (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11162-022-09694-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:reihed:v:64:y:2023:i:1:d:10.1007_s11162-022-09694-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/11162

DOI: 10.1007/s11162-022-09694-8

Access Statistics for this article

Research in Higher Education is currently edited by Robert K. Toutkoushian

More articles in Research in Higher Education from Springer, Association for Institutional Research
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().