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Lateral transfer (between community colleges) is second only to upward transfer (to a 4-year institution) among community college students' most common patterns of transfer. Yet, upward transfer is the focus of innumerable studies, while lateral transfer has received very little empirical attention. This study explores the occurrence and frequency of lateral transfer in California and its consequences for the measurement of one particular outcome, namely, completion of a credential. The results indicate that students transfer laterally quite frequently, leading to substantial undercounts in rates of credential completion when measured from the standpoint of a single community college or single district. Furthermore, the frequency of lateral transfer varies systematically with a number of student characteristics of recurrent interest in the literature, leading to exaggerated differences in the likelihood of credential completion between some groups of students and inaccurately attenuated differences between other groups, when measured under the single-college and single-district analytical frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accountability in performance is a subject of increasing attention and concern for community colleges. In California, much attention has been focused on student transfers from the community colleges to four-year institutions as a primary facet of institutional performance. This focus often leads to comparisons of transfer rates between colleges with the goal of identifying low performing and high performing colleges. However, comparison of raw rates of transfer ignores important differences in the structural conditions and exogenous variables affecting the performance of each college, leading to inequitable stratification of colleges and inaccurate classification of colleges in terms of transfer performance. To treat this fundamental incomparability of raw transfer rates, a method for equitable comparison of transfer outcomes was developed and implemented in California's community college system. This method involves major enhancements to prior efforts in California to implement transfer comparisons, including a less biased definition of the transfer rate, the use of statistical models to adjust for exogenous variables observed to affect the transfer outcome, the use of multiple student cohorts, and the inclusion of data on student transfers to a wider range of four-year institutions (both private and public, and both in-state and out-of-state). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

California's community college accountability strategy, the Partnership for Excellence program, includes, as an aspect of the outcome assessment component of the program, a mechanism to "level the playing field" between colleges. This function is accomplished through adjustment models, statistically derived equations that "adjust" for observed relationships between exogenous variables and college-level outcomes of interest. The development of adjustment models for each of the several outcomes has relied upon an exploratory process to derive a parsimonious set of exogenous variables with nonzero (statistically significant) relationships to the outcome of interest. One previously unmeasured adjustment variable has received considerable interest in discussions of the adjustment model development process, namely the academic preparedness of entering students at each college. This article addresses the work of the authors to develop a measure of student average academic preparation for use in "leveling the playing field" in community college outcome measurement and accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]