Why Community College Students 'Aspirations' Hold Steady

The peer-reviewed article I chose to read about was “Fake It ‘til You Make It”: Why Community College Students’ Aspirations “Hold Steady,” written by Kelly Nielsen. The article focuses on people who come from low-income families and are also in the lower class of society and how their aspirations of attending a four-year university might change while attending a community college. The purpose of this research is to find out the reasons why people’s aspirations of attending a four-year university change after attending community college. I decided to pursue this topic because I personally know many people who attend community colleges and never end up attending a four-year university for various reasons and wanted to see if there was a common trend as to why people never went on to a four-year university or if it is for personal reasons that vary from person to person. Large numbers of community college students aspire to bachelor’s degrees, but relatively few attain them (Anderson 1981; Brand, Pfeffer, and Goldrick-Rab 2014; Goldrick-Rab 2010; Kane and Rouse 1999; Rouse 1995). To explain this discrepancy between aspirations and outcomes, scholars have drawn together, in varying degrees, four factors affecting student experiences: (1) broad cultural frameworks of …show more content…
The first limitation of this study is that it was focused on just women. Everyone who was interviewed or even worked on the research team was a woman. By doing that, it eliminates the other half of the population and their thoughts on the matter. There were several things that the research team had to assume about the participants of the research by using interview techniques to try and find out as much as possible from someone in the smallest amount of time. By only using one gender, it could eliminate the other gender thinking about those things in a different matter, which would have changed the outcome of the research