Pathways to Success, or Unfulfilled Dreams? An Examination of Pathway-Based Disparities in Graduation Rates
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research on pathway-based disparities in postsecondary education (PSE) has mounted in recent decades, indicating that nonlinear pathways may hamper students’ academic success. In Ontario, Canada, research on this topic remains largely inconclusive given the historically low quality of available data sources, with researchers commonly relying on small and unrepresentative samples, short observation windows, and a restricted range of academic and demographic controls. Through this study we reexamine pathway-based disparities in graduation rates using a custom administrative linkage that constitutes the best available evidence to study this topic in the province of Ontario. Our statistical analyses confirm the existence of a statistically significant relationship between the PSE pathways traveled by students and their odds of graduation, particularly among community college-to-university transfers. We conclude by considering the implications of these findings for both policymakers and future research in this space in Ontario and comparable jurisdictions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".