“…Research on persistence in community college settings, even if limited, has been published for several decades, going back to studies by Bers (1988), Halpin (1990), Pascarella, Smart, and Ethington (1986), Voorhees (1987), and M. W. Webb (1988Webb ( , 1989. Based on these and subsequent articles that established the salience of various student background factors in terms of student persistence and college retention, tempered by data availability and parsimony, we included variables operationalizing students' race/ethnicity (Cabrera, Castañeda, Nora, & Hengstler, 1992;Grimes & Antworth, 1996;Strayhorn, 2012;Wood, 2012), gender (Grimes & Antworth, 1996;Pascarella & Terenzini, 2005), age (D'Amico, Morgan, & Rutherford, 2011;Nakajima, Dembo, & Mossler, 2012), English proficiency (Nakajima et al, 2012), high school grades (Feldman, 1993;Kuh et al, 2008), and generation status (i.e., education level of parents; Fike & Fike, 2008).…”