How Community College Educations Generate Both Science Capital and Science-Specific Transfer Capital Among Low-Income White Women Majoring in STEM

ABSTRACT

Given current enrollment patterns that feature a predominance of women, community college enrollment may offer potential for increasing gender diversity in STEM fields if students transfer successfully to four-year institutions. While many do not transfer, those who do can increase their stocks of science capital while enrolled at community college. This project follows pathways of some of the low-income students who successfully complete transfers to four-year institutions, focusing on interviews with White women. While not positive in every aspect, community college enrollment offered these low-income interviewees time to build science-related social and cultural capital that then helped them to succeed in transferring to four-year universities and to support them in STEM fields they perceived as being male-dominated. All the students came from households with low levels of science capital and had not strongly considered majoring in STEM prior to enrolling in community college. Interviewees describe their time at community colleges as critical in allowing them to explore STEM fields, construct positive relationships with STEM instructors, improve their time management skills, and increase their STEM self-confidence. These increased stores of science capital were not sufficient to keep all the transfer students majoring in STEM fields but did support the educational trajectories of all transfer students. Thus, community college enrollment can give students time to incubate both science capital and science-related transfer capital, the latter being especially useful for low-income White women in STEM.

Plain Language Summary

Community colleges enroll more women than they do men. As a result, they may be able to provide more students who might help to address goals to increase the number of women who are earning degrees in science, math, technology, and engineering (STEM) fields at four-year colleges. Most students who study at community colleges do not transfer to four-year universities, but something can be learned from the experiences of students who do make a successful transfer. In this paper, we interviewed seven low-income White women who were enrolled in several community colleges and said they wanted to transfer to four-year universities to study STEM majors, then followed up with them three years later. We found that their time at community college helped them to build skills and make connections that increased their probability of success in STEM fields. Notably, they learned how to manage their time, talked with professors and advisors, and received information about what studying STEM would look like during college and what jobs would be available for them after college. They also increased their self-confidence in studying STEM. All the students came from households with relatively low levels of information about science and were able to exit community college in a better position to succeed in STEM than they were when they entered.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. In total, 120 students of various gender and racial/ethnic groups met the project’s criteria at the time and were interviewed.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the National Science Foundation under grants [0969286 and 1420363].