The Effects of Differentiation on Educational Attainment: The Case of Community Colleges

This essay presents two contrasting hypotheses about the effects of community colleges—the view that these institutions “cool out” those who might attend four-year colleges, and the view that they increase schooling for students who would otherwise have no access to higher education—and argues that both may occur simultaneously. To test which one predominates, the author develops a model of educational attainment as a function of both labor market conditions and institutional structure. Using data from fifty states, he concludes that both hypotheses are partially correct and that, in addition, economic conditions strongly influence educational attainment.