ACCESS TO TECHNOLOGY AND THE TRANSFER FUNCTION OF COMMUNITY COLLEGES: EVIDENCE FROM A FIELD EXPERIMENT

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 article 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. (JEL J24, O33, I23, I24) I. INTRODUCTION Community colleges enroll nearly half of all students attending public universities and an even larger share of low-income and minority students (U.S. Department of Education 2011). (1) Community colleges are likely to play an increasingly important role in higher education and educating the future high-skilled workforce. Growth in the total number of enrollments in 2-year colleges has outpaced the growth rate for 4-year colleges over the past 3 decades, and President Obama recently proposed an unprecedented funding increase for community colleges with the goal of boosting the number of graduates by 5 million by 2020 (U.S. White House 2009). One of the primary goals of community colleges is to provide basic requirements training for entry to 4-year colleges. The cost savings from spending 2 years at a community college before entering a 4-year college can be substantial--average full-time annual tuition at a community college is $2,439 compared with $7,136 at a public university and $22,771 at a private university (U.S. Department of Education 2011). In some states with large community college systems, such as California, nearly half of all students attending a 4-year college previously attended a community college (California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office 2009). A potential constraint to transferring to 4-year colleges for some students, however, is limited access to information (American Association of Community Colleges 2004; Dowd and Gabbard 2006; Furchtgott-Roth, Jacobson, and Mokher 2009). Acquiring information about 4-year university choices, admission requirements, tuition, financial aid, and which courses are transferable is likely to be greatly enhanced through the use of information technology. (2) In California, for example, the widely used web page, assist.org, provides detailed school-to-school information on transferable courses, articulation agreements, and majors for all community colleges and 4-year universities in the state. (2) But, 1.2 million community college students do not have access to computers at home with the Internet. (4) The lack of access to home computers is especially acute among low-income students attending community colleges--roughly one third of students living in households with income less than $20,000 do not have computers with Internet access at home (Figure 1). These disparities reflect broader patterns of disparities in access to home computers, Internet, and other technology by income (Fairlie 2004; Goldfarb and Prince 2008; Hoffman and Novak 1998; Mossberger et al. …