Community Colleges and Tracking in Higher Education Sociology of Education COMMUNITY COLLEGES AND TRACKING IN HIGHER EDUCATION*

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The concept of tracking has provided an important toolfor understanding stratification within educational systems and has been applied to higher education by distinguishing between two-year and four-year colleges. In this paper, we make use of a natural experiment from the open-admissions program at the City University of New York to determine whether two-year colleges function as a separate track within higher education. We compare students who applied and were accepted to four-year colleges with others who applied but were placed in two-year colleges. Controlling for differences in academic background, we find that community colleges generally deter students from attaining their educational ambitions, but the effect is modest overall and varies notably from one community college to another. From the year-by-year academic progress of students in the two different contexts, it does not appear that there are special academic hurdles in the community colleges. Rather, students placed in them appear to become discouraged over time. Thus, the community colleges at CUNY do appear to function as a separate track, but their diversity persuades us that little is known about the specific mechanisms producing a community-college effect. Perhaps the most critical question in the sociology of education is whether it is what students bring to school or what schools do to students that explains ulti-mate educational achievement. The ques-tion has endured since the Coleman Re-port (Coleman, Campbell, Hobson, McPartland, Mood, Weinfeld and York, 1966) successfully challenged the then conventional wisdom that racial in-equalities in educational achievement are explained by the characteristics of schools attended by white and non-white students. Coleman and his co-workers were led to conclude that differences between schools cannot account for much of the cognitive inequality among students and, hence, of inequality in educational attainment; these evidently are explained far more by the social backgrounds of students. This conclusion has seemed less evident more recently. Recent research has fo-cused on allocation processes within schools, especially those associated with tracking, in order to explain the