English Learners' College Persistence and Completion: Paths to Success

Research has largely been silent on English Learner (EL) persistence and completion in U.S. community colleges, yet studies conducted across higher education report that only one in eight ELs completes a bachelor's degree (Kanno & Cromley, 2013). Many interventions have been proposed to improve college student persistence and completion. This paper examines two such interventions at one Oregon community college: ESL Bridge to College (an academic contextualized model of developmental education) and PASS Lane (a career contextualized model). Using descriptive statistics, we tabulated EL participants' persistence and completion rates. Results show that average persistence and completion rates are higher for participants of these two programs compared to the general student population and to former ELs who were enrolled prior to the creation of the PASS Lane and Bridge programs. More research is needed that controls for participants' background characteristics like academic ability, motivation, socioeconomic status, prior education, and external commitments to determine whether the programs themselves caused this increase in EL persistence and completion.