Date of Award

8-2021

Document Type

Dissertation - Campus Access Only

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Medical Science)

Degree Discipline

Education Leadership

Abstract

Chairs of Advisory Committee: Pamela Barber-Freeman and Jerrell Moore Community colleges are used by many high school students as a catalyst to earn a four-year degree or gain skills needed to enter the workforce (Curry, 2013’ Ma & Baum, 2016; Palmadessa, 2017). Cohen and Brawer (2008) described community colleges as two-year institutions that offer associate degrees and technical certificates for students who are not fully ready to attend a four-year university. While recruiting students for community college programs is aligned with the mission, keeping students enrolled until graduation is daunting (Kronenberger, 2012; Shapiro et al., 2016). According to the National Center for Education Statistics (2020), graduation rates at community colleges are comparatively lower than at four-year institutions.

The purpose of this research was to investigate the factors that influenced graduation from a Workforce Development program at a Southeast Texas community college. College-based workforce programs provide students with industry-particular skills for employment (Bromberg & Theokas, 2016; United States Department of Education, 2019). Although there are numerous studies of Career and Technical Education programs, few studies solely feature workforce programs at community colleges.

The researcher selected a quantitative research design and used numerical observations by means of a logistic regression model to determine whether graduation from workforce programs was predictive. The sample consisted of 300 students enrolled in a community college in Southeast Texas. Given the non-significance of the entire model, there was no practical significance to the effect of age. The researcher collected the primary data for this research from a community college data bank and placed the data in an Excel format. The data on the spreadsheet was used to compute a logistic regression model using Social Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 26. The tabulations for the variables showed the sample of CTE/Workforce Development students were mostly male, Hispanic, and enrolled in law enforcement courses. The available demographic information showed a high proportion of students with household incomes under $15,000 and with parents who completed high school. Of those students who had college readiness coursework, most completed the Texas Success Initiative (TSI) test. For the overall proposed model, there was a significant predictor of program completion. The direction of the coefficient indicated there was a significant difference at the p<.05 level for students based on their race.

These findings are important because they provided school administrators another viewpoint when considering methods to improve the graduation of workforce students at community colleges. Furthermore, the findings in this study can be the impetus to future studies that focus on topics beneficial to non-White groups such as African American and Hispanic male students. Future research may dig deeper in examining community colleges' graduation and retention tendencies with other variables. These topics may not only help school administrators, policymakers, and educators but students of color as well.

Keywords: community college workforce programs; community college retention

Committee Chair/Advisor

Pamela Barber-Freeman

Committee Co-Chair:

Jerrell Moore

Committee Member

Bernadine Duncan

Committee Member

Arthur Petterway

Committee Member

William H. Parker

Publisher

Prairie View A&M University

Rights

© 2021 Prairie View A & M University

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Date of Digitization

1/13/2025

Contributing Institution

John B Coleman Library

City of Publication

Prairie View

MIME Type

Application/PDF

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