Community colleges have become the new policy darlings over the last year-plus. Their lower price tag makes them an attractive place to begin a postsecondary education before transferring to a more expensive four-year school, while curricula that are more focused on local vocational needs increases their popularity as a place to get new or updated training.

Not surprisingly then, community colleges are becoming a larger factor in many states’ plans for higher education. The Chronicle of Higher Education, for example, has a story from Sunday about how New Orleans is pushing for greater use of two-year schools in its postsecondary education plans.

Community colleges are also becoming a popular target for the University of Central Florida (UCF), though for different reasons, as Inside Higher Ed reported last week:

The University of Central Florida, which enrolled a record 53,537 students this fall, introduced DirectConnect in 2006. The program offers guaranteed entrance and accelerated admission to the university for all students who complete an associate degree from and alumni of Brevard Community College, Lake Sumter Community College, Seminole State College of Florida and Valencia Community College. High school students applying to these four community colleges can also signal their desire to attend UCF on their application and are similarly guaranteed admission once they earn a two-year degree.

The article notes that the DirectConnect program currently has about 35,000 students that could end up transferring into UCF in the near future.

So Louisiana is turning to community colleges as a way of improving the state’s graduation rates while also reducing spending, while UCF could very well get a huge enrollment bump from its transfer program. But are there other effects are these programs likely to have?

The research findings from Crossing the Finish Line, an impressive quantitative book that presents the analysis of a new extensive database to take a closer look at bachelor’s degree attainment, provides a few suggestions. (If you want to read more about the book itself, check out Chad Aldeman’s great series of posts discussing the findings: here, here, here, and here.)

First consider the case of Louisiana. One thing that we can expect is that a big push to two-year enrollment is going to result in a decrease in the number of four-year degrees awarded. This seems like an obvious finding since Louisiana’s plan calls for fewer students to be in four-year schools in the first place. But if the hope is that students start their careers in the less expensive community college system and then move on to and graduate from a university, then policymakers may be playing with fire. Using data from North Carolina high school graduates, Crossing the Finish Line found that white students who started at a two-year college earned a bachelor’s degree at a rate of between 26 to 36 percentage points lower than students with the same academic qualifications who started at a four-year school. Researchers observed the same trend when looking at black students of similar academic characteristics, observing a gap of around 17 percentage points in the bachelor’s degree attainment rate for students who started a four-year school instead of a two-year institution.

Now, it is possible that Louisiana may be a bit of an exception, as the Chronicle notes that 75 percent of the state’s college students are in four-year schools, about 25 percentage points higher than the national average. Given that Louisiana’s graduation rate is around 42 percent, a successful shift of students that would drop out in the four-year sector to two-year colleges where they can an earn associate’s degree could actually boost credential production in the state. Successfully finding those individuals will be an important part of making sure the transition is effective. Second, Louisiana will need to make sure that it has good supports in place for students who want to earn bachelor’s degrees but are now starting at two-year schools. Those individuals could be the biggest losers from this shift.

What about UCF’s coming influx of community college graduates? The Crossing the Finish Line research suggests this could be a promising population to target. According to its data, students that make it through a two-year program and then enroll in a university graduate at a rate at or above students of similar academic ability who start at a four-year school. At flagship and first-tier public schools, two-year transfers have a graduation rate that is 10 percentage points above academically similar peers who started a t a four-year school. At less-selective public institutions—which would probably include a school such as UCF—the two-year transfer graduation rate is 18 percentage points higher than the rate for their academic peers who started at the four-year institution.

In other words, enrolling students who have already completed a two-year program very well could produce graduates than if UCF had enrolled a student with similar ability in the first place. As Crossing the Finish Line’s authors phrased it:

The patterns we have just described certainly suggest that many of the institutions in our study could enroll and graduate more low-[socioeconomic status] students—and simultaneously increase their overall graduation rates–by enrolling more transfers, especially those from two-year colleges.

At first, this seems like a strange finding—transfer students generally have lower incomes and high school grade point averages, which are strongly correlated with lower graduation rates. But at the same time, completing a two-year program and successfully navigating the transfer process signals a certain degree of commitment and perseverance, which are important for getting through a four-year school. Enrolling these transfer students thus provides a way for colleges to select for those characteristics, something they can only guess at for freshmen by looking at transcripts and essays.

Community colleges are finally becoming a popular discussion topic for policymakers concerned with increasing graduation and credential-attainment rates. Hopefully states such as Louisiana and schools such as UCF will keep in mind the lessons presented by Crossing the Finish Line while they are cementing their policies toward these institutions.