A National Study of the Financial Implications of Community College Baccalaureate Adoption

ABSTRACT

Community college baccalaureate (CCB) degree programs have become increasingly popular in recent years, with over 100 community colleges in 24 states currently offering at least one bachelor’s degree program. Despite the growing prevalence of CCB degree programs, the financial implications of CCB adoption remain largely unknown. This study leverages a novel national dataset and employs a difference-in-differences regression approach to examine the relationship between CCB adoption and multiple indicators of institutional revenue and financial priorities. We find that CCB adoption is associated with decreases in community colleges’ reliance on public funds and increases in their reliance on tuition and fees.

KEYWORDS:

• Community college
• community college baccalaureate
• educational policy
• higher education finance
• quasi-experimental analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Following Wooldridge (2012), we included two years of data before the treatment and two years of data after treatment. Thus, all colleges that adopted the CCB program before 2004 or after 2015 are excluded from the sample of this study.