Access to Techonology and the Transfer Function of Community Colleges: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Robert Fairlie and Samantha H. Grunberg

Santa Cruz Department of Economics, Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, UC Santa Cruz

Abstract: Access to information may represent an important barrier to learning about and ultimately transferring to 4-year colleges for low-income community college students. This paper explores the role that access to information technology, in particular, plays in enhancing, or possibly detracting from, the transfer function of the community college. Using data from the first-ever field experiment randomly providing free computers to students, we examine the relationships between access to home computers and enrollment in transferable courses and actual transfers to 4-year colleges. The results from the field experiment indicate that the treatment group of students receiving free computers has a 4.5 percentage point higher probability of taking transferable courses than the control group of students not receiving free computers. The evidence is less clear for the effects on actual transfers to 4-year colleges and the probability of using a computer to search for college information (which possibly represents one of the mechanisms for positive effects). In both cases, point estimates are positive, but the confidence intervals are wide. Finally, power calculations indicate that sample sizes would have to be considerably larger to find statistically significant treatment effects and reasonably precise confidence intervals given the actual transfer rate point estimates.

Keywords: Social and Behavioral Sciences; education; community college; transfers; technology; computers; digital divide; experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-11-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-exp and nep-ict
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/2gw7r2xk.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: ACCESS TO TECHNOLOGY AND THE TRANSFER FUNCTION OF COMMUNITY COLLEGES: EVIDENCE FROM A FIELD EXPERIMENT (2014)
Working Paper: Access to Technology and the Transfer Function of Community Colleges: Evidence from a Field Experiment (2014)
Working Paper: Access to Technology and the Transfer Function of Community Colleges: Evidence from a Field Experiment (2013)
Working Paper: Access to Technology and the Transfer Function of Community Colleges: Evidence from a Field Experiment (2012)
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:cdl:ucscec:qt2gw7r2xk

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Santa Cruz Department of Economics, Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, UC Santa Cruz Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lisa Schiff (help@escholarship.org).