The Deconstructive Approach to Understanding Community College Students’ Pathways and Outcomes

Abstract

Two related themes currently dominate discourse on open-access colleges, particularly community colleges: increasing college-going and degree attainment and improving the performance of postsecondary institutions with respect to producing graduates. Largely missing from this discourse, however, is cogency concerning the innumerable ways in which students use open-access institutions, and the ways in which students’ patterns of use interact with institutional policies and practices to influence the outcomes that they experience. Absent a thorough understanding of students’ pathways through the institution, the development of interventions and the adjustment of institutional policies and practices to improve students’ outcomes will be more a product of guesswork than of sound empirical reasoning. Unfortunately, traditionally favored analytical approaches are unlikely to rectify this large and troubling gap in our understanding. In this essay, I present the case for a different approach—a deconstructive approach—to illuminate students’ pathways and the relationships between these pathways and outcomes.