Spending at Baccalaureate-Granting Community Colleges: A Focus on Institutional Aid

ABSTRACT

Community college baccalaureates (CCBs) provide an affordable pathway to baccalaureate-level education but increasing tuition rates present a potential financial barrier for students. Institutional aid as a cost-constraining mechanism has historically been less utilized in the 2-year sector when compared to traditional 4-year institutions. Yet, resource dependence theory and tuition discounting literature suggest amidst growth into 4-year institutions, community colleges may leverage institutional aid to address affordability concerns. Utilizing IPEDS data spanning 1999 to 2018 and leveraging a generalized difference-in-difference technique, this study explores the relationship between CCB adoption and institutional aid policy. Results suggest no distinct shifts in approaches to institutional aid after CCB adoption. Implications for practitioners and future research are discussed.

Plain Language Summary

An increasing number of community colleges are now offering four-year baccalaureate (CCBs) degrees. To support the development and implementation of these programs, some institutions are shifting some of the costs onto students and families in the form of increased tuition and fees. This study uses a quantitative approach to assess whether, like other four-year institutions, CCB-granting schools are leveraging institutional financial aid to offset some of those increased costs and maintain the sector’s historic commitment to affordability. The results provide novel insight into an underexplored topic in the community college sector – institutional financial aid – and direct practitioners at CCB-granting institutions to consider the use and implications of institutional aid amidst baccalaureate-degree expansion.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. A large portion of this missingness stems from institutions not reporting spending on institutional aid, one of the primary outcomes of interest. Robustness checks were conducted using a non-imputed sample (n = 455; 53 treated institutions); the results were qualitatively similar to those using the imputed data and yielded the same conclusions regarding statistical significance. Tables available upon request.

2. This does not include partial children institutions, which reported assets and liabilities to parent institutions but reported their own expenditures. Per Jaquette and Parra’s (2014) recommendations, those institutions were reported as standalone observations.

3. Robustness checks including a longer time horizon yield more imprecise, yet qualitatively similar results in terms of statistical significance.

4. The current empirical strategy does not allow for examinations of “count” outcomes, like the number of students receiving institutional aid, based on the poisson distribution. Logging the outcome helps address this concern; alternative specifications utilizing the non-transformed count and fixed-effects regression yielded similar results to the primary findings.