The “Missing English Learner” in Higher Education: How Identification, Assessment, and Placement Shape the Educational Outcomes of English Learners in Community Colleges

Postsecondary education serves as a pathway to upward social mobility. Yet too often, students hailing from economically disadvantaged families, racial/ethnic minority groups, those who are first-generation learners, and immigrants frequently encounter barriers that deter their application, enrollment, and success in higher education. In this chapter, we focus on the role of identification, assessment, and course placement policies as a set of factors that impact the educational attainment of English Learners. In particular, we focus on the policies and practices commonly used in community colleges to sort students into prerequisite coursework and present a contrast between the 2-year postsecondary sector and the policies and guidelines that rule the identification, assessment, and placement of English Learners in public schools. We summarize the extant literature documenting the effectiveness of the assessment tools used to classify and sort English Learners into various prerequisite courses and link them to the observed disparities in outcomes between English Learners and native English-speaking peers. We conclude with a set of policy and research recommendations aimed at bolstering the postsecondary educational outcomes of English Learners and building the data infrastructure necessary to expand research in this area.