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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.052 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".