While Massachusetts is home to the world’s most elite universities such as Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it’s often community colleges that provide a lifeline to many of the state’s least well-off students. That’s thanks largely to programs that offer associate degrees in healthcare specialties and “STEM” – science, technology, engineering, and mathematics – fields. These often two-year degree and certificate programs can help students land high paying jobs in nursing, medical imaging and dental hygienics as well as in engineering, cybersecurity and electronics.

But despite state efforts to level the playing field for these struggling students – such as by offering paths to free community college education – many students are unable to complete associate degrees that could help them earn solid paychecks. And major disparities exist in who obtains both STEM and healthcare associate degrees in Massachusetts within 6 years of starting the programs. Those were two major takeaways from a new report out by a team of Harvard and Brown university researchers.
The report found that male students were more likely to succeed in STEM programs than female students were in general; that women were more likely to complete healthcare degrees than men; that enrollment and success rates varied among racial groups; and that obtaining strong math skills in high school was critical for determining who could break into the fields. The report also gave a window into the increasing number of students from extremely low-income families entering community colleges, which often have vastly fewer resources than their wealthy four-year college counterparts.

Indeed, one of the most striking trends over the period – 2005 to 2016 – in which the report’s researchers reviewed tens of thousands of students was the hike in enrollment of poorer students to community colleges. Study after study has already shown that the least well-off are the most likely to face obstacles in higher education of all types.

“Massachusetts community colleges, increasingly, are serving students from low-income families, and that means they face an increasingly difficult challenge, because those students find it more difficult to pay for a college, and they also come often with not having strong elementary and secondary educations. So consequently they have lots of skills they need to build,” Richard Murnane, an economist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the main author of the report, told the Sampan.

In 2005, around 21% of students entering the community college programs came from low-income families, as defined by those eligible for reduced-price school lunches, found Murnane’s team, and by 2016, the number shot up to 48%.

The trend is important, said Murnane, for two big reasons. One is the stress it puts on the schools and two it means more and more students need help to climb up academic and economic ladders.
Community colleges increasingly need to support “young people who have challenges in their math skills and who, in many cases, face very complex personal lives. All of them are working. Many of them have family,” Murnane said. “As one community college dean said, a great many students are one crisis away from dropping all their courses. And a common crisis is that you lose a babysitter and you’ve got very young kids, or your car breaks down and you don’t have the money to fix it – you can’t get the class. So those are the challenges that a great many community college students face. That is not the case – anywhere near that extent – for young people going to four-year colleges.”

This is critical, because an earlier study has already shown that earning associate degrees in STEM and especially healthcare fields can have big pay offs for students who can’t get into four-year colleges. An associate degree or certificate in healthcare, STEM, and trade-related occupations, in fact, won the highest payoffs, found the 2021 study “Pathways to Economic Mobility,” led by Alicia Sasser Modestino of Northeastern University. Healthcare proved the most lucrative, found Modestino, “providing the highest annual earnings boost — of $10,000 to $15,000 per year” when compared to people with no degree or certificate outside of high school.

“(Modestino) asked, ‘Among people who get associate degrees, what’s the economic payoff?’ And the answer was, it was really quite good in the two fields, but not so much in other fields,” said Murnane, noting his work was a followup to Modestino’s study.

Murnane’s team specifically wanted to see if community college students were choosing these high-paying fields of study – and what disparities existed. Among the other findings of the report were:

Racial disparities were pronounced between whites and Asians and Blacks and Hispanics. “White, and especially Asian, students in every entry cohort had higher probabilities of (associate degree) attainment in both healthcare and STEM programs than did their Hispanic and Black peers,” according to the report.
The reason for this, said Murnane, is likely mainly because of Black and Hispanic students are more likely to come from lower-income families and less likely to have attended high school in communities with strong school systems, whereas the case was most likely the opposite for the white and Asian students.
“It just kind of reinforces some of these other demographic observations,” he said.

Sex disparities were pronounced. “Our analyses revealed several patterns. First, male students had a much higher probability of earning an associate degree in a STEM program within six years of their entry into a MACC than did females. Second, female students had a much higher six-year probability of earning an (associate degree in a healthcare program than did males,” found the report.

Healthcare-related associate degrees came with several challenges.
“You can’t start out in a nursing program or in a medical imaging program, you have to first take prerequisites and then pass a national exam, and that takes a minimum of one year,” said Murnane. “And for many students, it takes more than one year, and then when you finally are prepared, there’s often a waiting list (for the practicums).”
The time it took to complete these programs was often longer than for STEM programs, the report found, meaning that the extended investment in time meant students were at greater risk of failing to complete the programs.

Immigrant families can have higher burdens. While this was not specifically part of the report, Murnane told the Sampan that areas with high populations of new immigrants can face more challenges, especially when the population is poorer and has lower English language skills.
“Another complication is that in places such as Lynn – they have experienced a vast number of immigrants coming into the schools. Forty percent of the students entering the two high schools in Lynn are from Central America. That’s an astounding number. And consequently, those children have enormous needs. They need to learn English, many of them are working at night because they need to send money home or pay off (the people that helped) them get here. So the challenges are utterly enormous, and I think the state is trying to deal with them, but it has a long way to go to recognize the how challenging it is for the schools to serve them well.”